Going Gray: How to Embrace Your Authentic Self with Grace and Style Book

Going Gray : What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood by Anne Kreamer is an easy read on a seemingly light-weight subject-but one that I find intensely interesting (as I suspect many women do)-hair. The book is also concerned with a more obviously serious subject, aging. Although neither subject is handled in a deeply philosophical way, I found the points made fascinating and personally relevant.

At 49, Anne Kreamer has had (several) successful careers as well as a happy marriage and a family. One day, she is looking through some photographs and is struck by one of her with a daughter and a friend. She finds the pictures of the other two women "authentic" but feels that there is a falseness to her image which she decides is the result of her hair color-a dye she has used for years. This leads her into an experiment in "going gray"-what it would mean to let herself look her age, to not fight it with hair products.

Kreamer explores what hair - and its color - means to women (mostly in the United States but also in France) and shares her experience of how she felt letting her natural gray show.

I am struggling myself at the moment to define (or discover) who I am at this stage in life. Kreamer's book was a perfect find for me. I decided to try out a "natural" look myself (with an option to go back to coloring if I want!) to see what that reveals about me and maybe clear the way for some decisions about how I want to present myself now, what my "look" is or should or could be. It's an adventure and I appreciate Kreamer's presenting it in that way.


Going Gray : What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood is probably not for everyone but if you're a "woman of a certain age" (as the French say) or interested in hair and what it says about us or how our obsession with it reveals who we are, I strongly recommend this book.