Reader Gwendolyn asked a great question in a recent comment: How do you feel about gray hair, and how do you act on those feelings? 

For me, I have a deep-seated phobia of embarking on a hair-coloring regimen because it means adopting a permanent lifestyle of touch-ups and re-colors.  Something about that obligatory every-3-months pattern just gives me the high-maintenance skeevies. 

A few times, I’ve tried a “pigment” treatment that washes out gradually, as opposed to color dyes that grow out and expose the dreaded roots.  The problem with the pigments is that they gave me a goth kind of look, pigmenting my highlights out along with the gray.

So I sport some stray grays, plus one sort of mini-gray streak, and I try to embrace it.  My gray-hair heroine is “What Not to Wear’s” Stacy London, who told the LA Times recently, “I never wash that gray right out of my hair because I like when people call me Rogue or Cruella De Vil.”

This doesn’t even touch the health issues associated with hair-dying, most notably the use of ammonia in most commercial dyes.  Anything that can cut through burnt-on lasagna crust shouldn’t be anywhere near my brain, says I.  Not that there aren’t many ammonia-free hair colors on the market, but still….

So let’s dish – what do you do about your gray hair?  I’d love to hear what you’ve tried–and why you’ve decided gray is or isn’t okay.

On a related note, have you tried our quiz yet:  Are You Aging Gracefully?

(image via: http://www.umbc.edu/blogs/changingaging/2008/01/to_gray_or_not_to_gray.html)