Wow, some hope for women who don't color their hair...

I started to go grey very young and in my 30s and 40s I colored my hair. How embarrassing!

Some very unkind comments from an unmentionable acquaintance, the mess of it all, and its being contrary to my nature were percolating; when my son got sick, I just gave it up. Now I have grey (salt and pepper? more salt all the time) hair. How embarrassing!

Almost all my friends color their hair, and when I see that my 85-year-old friend still is a blond it makes me nervous. This article cheered me right up.

Extracts from
Young Trendsetters Streak Their Hair With Gray
By Ruth La Ferla for the New York Times
ACTING on an impulse last month, Faran Krentcil dipped her shoulder-length curls into a bathtub filled with Virgin Snow, a pale lavender tint, in the hope, she said, of emerging a "rock 'n' roll fairy princess."

Ms. Krentcil, the 28-year old digital director at Nylon magazine, got her wish and then some, her lilac fading within days to an otherworldly gray. A mistake? Sure, but no matter, Ms. Krentcil said. During New York Fashion Week, she stood out like a beacon. "More people took notice," she said. "I got photographed a lot."

Her color malfunction had placed her, it seemed, in a league with fashion's bright young things, affluent trendsetters...

In embracing a tint their mothers would have shunned ... in Manhattan's West Village, models and bohemian types began asking for gray streaks about six months ago... "When one gets on the bandwagon, they all do."

Sharon Dorram, an influential New York colorist, said that among her downtown New York patrons, it is mostly younger women, renegade types, who request gray. Not lost on Ms. Dorram is the irony that their older, more conventional counterparts spent $1.3 billion to cover their grays last year, according to Nielsen.

Women warming to the arctic look are streaking, tipping or bleaching their hair in tones from Warhol white to Brillo steel. Some are experimenting with color at home, as Ms. Krentcil did, or adding clip-on streaks like those sold online by Eva Scrivo, who tipped the models' hair gray at the Thakoon show in New York last fall.

Others may part with $200 or more to affect the appearance of the White Queen in "Alice in Wonderland," or any number of Park Avenue divas... to dye one's hair gray is to flout one of fashion's last taboos.