When I finally decided to stop coloring my hair, I was worried that I didn’t have enough natural gray. A colorist had told me it was about 25 percent of my hair, and that anything less than 50 percent was insufficient for silver foxiness. But what I really dreaded was the growing out process itself. For starters, I had long hair and I emphatically didn’t want a pixie. And I had seen too many heads with a harsh, skunky demarcation line of old color around a circle of gray—like a bad beret.
Then I heard about Farah Hurdle and greyblending. I’ve never looked back.
There is no sign outside Hurdle’s San Diego salon, but despite the low profile, her Instagram page warns that she’s usually booked months in advance. What her clients from all over California and beyond come for is greyblending (she says she spells it with a British e rather than an a “because I like the way it looks”), a technique to erase that Friar Tuck tonsure line.
Hurdle created greyblending 10 years ago “mostly because my clients with root touchups were always unhappy,” she says. “They were unhappy when they would come in because they could see the amount of gray they had in the line of demarcation, and then they were unhappy a week later when they would text me and say ‘I can already see gray.’” At the time, Hurdle had a two-year-old daughter and began mulling about female self-acceptance. Over time she started to see some hair color—like highlights—as lovely fun, but mandatory frequent full-on cover-ups as disempowering.
The journey toward greyblending begins with a consultation during which Hurdle likes to see at least an inch of a client’s roots, especially if they plan to go completely gray. Exactly what she does next depends on hair texture, hair damage, the colors of the roots, the old color, even whether someone uses keratin or minoxidil, which she says can affect color intensity. But the blending itself is “all about distraction,” she says. “Initially we’re trying to highlight the areas where they have more silver, and then on the areas where they might be darker, we’re lowlighting,” she explains. Toners (for instance, blue or purple for blondes) and demi-permanent color are used to add even more dimension around the gray. A head of greyblended hair almost looks woven—the exact opposite of the look of single process dye jobs. “All the colors create a beautiful distraction," says Hurdle.
For some, greyblending is “just a matter of making the upkeep of graying hair much less horrible,” says Hurdle. Her clients who aren’t ready to go all-natural are able to space out root touch-ups from every few weeks to every few months. It’s a regimen that’s especially easy for blondes (real or fake) because the contrast is less stark. Someone with white roots and what stylists call level four or five (i.e. very dark) hair is probably not a good candidate, Hurdle acknowledges. “I wish I could go into all of the colleges and high schools and say, ‘Don’t ever put full brunette color on your hair,’” she says. “It’s hair jail.”
With touch-up greyblending, foils go all the way to the root line. But about three-fourths of Hurdle’s new clients have already decided to join the silver sisterhood, and in those cases, greyblending is all done below the line of demarcation to adapt to the colors of the new growth. Clients have one to three sessions eight to 12 weeks apart. with darker hair typically requiring extra zhuzhery. But “by that third appointment they kind of tilt their head and go, ‘Oh, I’m actually okay with this,’” says Hurdle. “Like, something shifts.”
One thing that most likely shifts is what Hurdle teaches you to see when you look at your gray. Although she describes herself as “one of those rare 49-year-olds with, like, five gray hairs,” Hurdle is a total poms-poms out silver stan, and wishes she personally had more.
Gray is first of all not a sign of age, she insists (not that there’s anything wrong with natural aging). As Allure has previously reported, about half of the population will have gray hair by age 50, though most people will see a few strands around age 30. Hurdle has personally met several women who sprouted gray hairs at seven, and many in their teens. Her gray-embracing clients’ age range starts in the early 30s. It’s a generation, she says, that’s largely attuned both to the attraction of “natural” lifestyles and the diverse ways that beauty can be defined.
Sarah Lipsie, was a 19-year-old college sophomore when her gray first appeared. Her initial reaction, she says, was “oh, crap,” and she spent years hiding her roots. “It was definitely something that just my hairdresser knew about,” she says. Highlights and various cover-up products like hair mascara worked for awhile. But she had a prominent natural white streak, and by her late twenties she needed to do full brown color and blonde highlights every few weeks. She was especially self-conscious because of her career as a medical device saleswoman in affluent Orange County—a profession where stylish, youthful presentation matters. Lipsie initially went to Hurdle to get some relief through greyblending on her high maintenance touchups. Then, finally, at 41, encouraged by Hurdle, she took the plunge.
What’s changed? She’s the only Arctic fox among the mothers in her seven-year-old son’s class, but her hair is thicker, smoother, grows longer than it ever did before, and doesn’t require conditioner. Women come up to her in restaurants and airports—and at cardiology offices during the work day—“and you can see the wheels turning in their heads, like ‘I want do this; how can I do this?’” If Lipsie could talk to her 25 year old self, “I would tell her, don’t worry, your natural hair is going to be something beautiful that you can appreciate much sooner than you realize in life, not when you’re 65 or 70....and you’re going to get more compliments than you ever did before.”
Hurdle calls gray hair “our natural animal print” because everyone’s streaks, whorls, and natural highlights are unique, making silver not just another color, but a particularly vibrant one. In stylist-speak, the popular process of making hair lighter around the face is known as “the money piece,” she adds—and at least 50 percent of the women she has helped go gray have this feature. “And I go, ‘Oh my God, look at you, people are paying for this, and it’s naturally growing out of your head.”
Enough people agree that Hurdle is now giving courses to a dozen other stylists in the area to teach them how to handle her overflow of clients. “But I don’t want to call this a trend,” she says. “It’s a way that women are choosing to live their lives now.”
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