52+: On Going Gray and Owning It!

If you’ve spent any time in 52Nudges, you know that I am a huge fan of people who summon up their courage and create changes in their lives.

Suszi McFadden is one of those brave people I’ve been watching quietly from the sidelines for a while. Full disclosure, we’ve been friends since the early 1980s, a friendship that has grown closer now that we are adults and live about an hour apart. Leaving a corporate career to go out on her own as a photographer was a big step she took several years ago, and it’s been exciting to watch her succeed. But it was her decision recently to ditch the hair color and allow her natural gray* to grow in that held my fascination. Would she stick to it? Would she wear it well? If she can do it, can I…?

To get my answers, I nudged myself to “Interview someone I admire”.

Suszi is about two years into the transformation process. “I am loving the gray!” she told me. “I want it to gray faster!”

Suszi began coloring her hair when she was 16. “It was my form of creative expression,” she said. “I did the ’80s right, from perms to seven colors of shadow on my eyelids—at one time. Do you remember my brush with a ‘Flock of Seagulls’ haircut?” she said with a laugh. “Yeah, that was BAD!”

Over the past few decades, she has tried on every shade of red, from copper to burgundy, and had “one ill-fated dance with blonde”. After “one complete disaster doing it on my own”, in which a peroxide accident left her with a skunk stripe and leopard spots, she committed to paying a professional stylist to do the coloring correctly.

But the maintenance took a lot of time and work, not to mention expense. In the last phases, she was going for brighter and brighter, ultimately sporting a bright orange. “But I was graying at a rate like a five o’clock shadow,” she said. “I kept asking my stylist, ‘Can I do it yet?’”

The “yet” was important. It’s one thing to transition from mostly gray to all gray, she explained to me, another to transition when there’s just gray at the temples. You have to have “enough” for the transition to succeed, otherwise it can be difficult to maintain the gray.

“I wanted it to be more about making a statement as opposed to looking like you’ve let yourself go,” Suszi said, and with her stylist’s advice—and with her nephew’s bar mitzvah on the horizon—she went for one more round of color.

Finally her stylist agreed she had enough to get started, and her expert advice and attention was crucial. “It was hard going from bright orange, and it was hard with straight hair,” Suszi said, having noticed that women with curly textured hair could better carry off the layers of colors during the transition. “So I cheated.” Not wanting to wait for it all to grow out on its own timetable, she had her stylist bleach out all of her hair, then tone her a warm gray. “I literally went gray overnight,” Suszi says, “which was super fun.”

But it didn’t last. She was still “more pepper than salt”, so the dark hairs turned yellow over time, and in different lighting, such as fluorescent, it wasn’t pretty. “I joked I had to walk around in my own lighting,” Suszi said. To compensate, Suszi kept going shorter. “Previously, whenever I was bored, I colored my hair,” she reminded me. Now she makes a creative statement with her sassy pixie cut.

It’s impossible to miss the growing trend on going gray. “I feel like it’s everywhere, and I think it’s stunning,” she said. “A lot of actresses have made it glamorous, including Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson, Gillian Anderson, and Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada.” We can add Sharon Osborne and Jane Fonda as other recent converts.

For Suszi, the change is less about the outward appearance and more about the internal feeling. It’s about women owning who they are. She explained how she came to this. “I got my photo taken about two years ago, to experience what my clients experience. The photographer asked me to send photos I found online, photos I found inspiring. All of them were of older women, significantly older than I am, 70 to 80 years old. They were owning their style, their look. Quirky or classy or eclectic—just all in!” she said. “I want to be that person: 100% all in!”

This recent photo says all that to me. Strong, gorgeous, 100% Suszi.

* I noticed Suszi used the terms “silver” and “gray” interchangeably as we chatted, so I asked her about this. “When I talk about it, I say I’ve ‘gone gray’,” she said. “I consider myself to be gray because there’s still so much pepper in my hair. I think of ‘silver’ as all white.” Some of her friends, she said, push back and insist on “silver”, feeling it’s a more empowering term. We both agree that we should use whichever term feels right to the individual.

Suszi McFadden takes photographs of families, kids, and adults, and captures the best of women in all stages of life. Check out her work at https://suzmcfaddenphoto.com/. To see her more creative work, including shoots with professional models, follow her on Instagram @suzmcfaddenphoto.