Blue Hair — Not just for Punks
It used to be that we made fun of little old ladies with blue hair. It was the physical sign of social uselessness and impending senility, or so we thought. We mocked them in songs like “Blue Hairs Driving in My Lane” (ttto “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” in case you didn’t pick that up).
It was a thing that old women with white or silver hair did. They’d go to their hairdressers regularly and ask for a blue rinse. (Many of them pronounced it “wrench.” No, I don’t know why.) I also don’t know why they did it. Maybe it was to prevent the hair from acquiring a yellowish tinge, as it sometimes does. Maybe it was a holdover from when you would add “bluing” to laundry to get whites really clean. (Bluing is also something you do to guns to make them dark and shiny. It must work differently on sheets. But I digress.)
Then blue hair came into style — for young people, both men and women. Not the pale, ice blue of the blue rinse, either. These blues were deep and vibrant and also made the wearer unemployable when they first appeared. There are still businesses that feel that way, but a lot have surrendered to the inevitable.
It wasn’t just blue, either. Shocking pink, Day-Glo green, candy-apple red, and deep purple were also popular choices. Wearing hair in Kodachrome colors signaled that you belonged to a tribe of young people that didn’t care for convention, or were musicians, or enjoyed other body mods like piercing. Multi-colored hair went along with mohawks and other radical hairstyles to separate the free spirits from the “straights.”
Why are we now seeing older people sporting other-than-natural hair? Maybe the teens and twenty-somethings simply aged but refused to give up their signature hair. Maybe they became parents of teens and indulged in mutual hair-dying as a bonding experience. Maybe they are baby boomers with memories of letting their freak flag fly, as we used to say. Maybe they retired and no longer cared about employment. Or maybe these women reached an age when they no longer gave a crap about what other people thought of them.
Whatever the reason, they indulge in brightly colored locks. I have considered doing something colorful with my hair, though I meant to start out slowly, with those clip-on strands of pink or green, often adorned with beads or feathers. Instead, I stopped going to the hairdresser at all and let my hair grow long and gray, like my Granny’s did. (Not that I am above using someone else’s non-gray hair on special occasions.)
I still might dabble in crayon colors someday. I admire the older women who defy convention or simply create their own. Many of the women I know have indulged, and not just the artists, either. Women from all walks of life have jumped on the trend and now sport outrageously colored locks. I have the impression that young people enjoy seeing this, but I’m not altogether sure. Maybe the teens will go back to natural hair colors in reaction. The seniors may have stolen the style completely.
Perhaps this trend will fade, like so many others, and seem as ridiculous in old photos as the big hair that almost destroyed the ozone layer from all the hairspray. I prefer to think that seniors are going to continue rocking this look as long as they can and, as new populations reach senior status, they will join in and let their freak flags fly, too!
