Gray Hair Transition Story

Hi guys welcome to hillary home and today's video we're going to be talking about transitioning to gray hair, because i am so happy and so grateful that it's been one week since i trimmed off the very last vestiges. The last remnants of me dyeing my hair and fighting what nature gave me and fighting the genetic predisposition to premature graying that i inherited from my father, whom i had taught. So let me tell you a story about transitioning to gray hair and why i am so happy to finally be in this place where i have got my silvers, my grays, my whites, whatever you want to call them, they are here now they are welcome. I am happy to have them and i feel awesome for having them so the first time that i noticed that i had uh gray silvers was probably when i was about seven or eight years old, and i i had a few of them sort of like in Here so you couldn't see them along the hairline, but if you went in, you could see like there was a little patch here and i remember thinking oh wow nope. You know it's not normal for a seven or eight year old to have white hair. Does this mean i've got super powers because i used to love comic books and all of that sort of stuff, but no, i didn't have any superpowers and for the longest time i thought it was really cool that i had those silvers until they started becoming visible To other kids at school, and of course you know what, if kids gon na do when they see something a little bit different, they make fun of it, and so i got made fun of it a lot enough for it to become something that i didn't like And i remember wanting to dye my hair because the years went by it just started increasing you know just spreading out, but my mom wouldn't let me dye her my hair, and rightly so, because i was you know too young. She basically wasn't very much into chemicals and stuff like that, and rightly so, but once i started working and earning my own money, i was like i'm making my own money, it's my money. I can dye my hair and i started dyeing my hair in a huge chunk of my 20s. I spent dyeing my hair trying so hard to hide the grays trying to figure out. What'S my natural hair color should i go dark black because it would look really weird, because my natural hair color is more kind of like a really deep brown rather than a black but yeah, and to add to this was the fact that i basically couldn't really Afford to go to a salon to get my hair colored, so i was doing the diet yourself using the home kids. I know which can be quite fine if you know what you're doing, but in my 20s i just didn't know what i was doing. But i was doing it anyway and it reached a head when i tried to do some super fancy stuff to try and make my hair look exactly like jennifer lopez's hair, which was so crazy at the time. I didn't realize that they had hair extensions and photoshopping and stuff like that, and i actually believed the ants that you would see telling you that if you used to say it can make it look like this. So it's a toy and my hair fell out after i put on too much hair dieting and i was like okay, fine, i have to start over. I have to grow my hair and i started growing my hair again, but then i would dye it, but i was a bit more mindful and i was looking for milder dyes for the natural ones and i had varying degrees of success. And then i did get to a point in my thirties, where i completely shaved my head. I think i remember getting obsessed with this idea that i wanted to see what i looked like completely bold, because i'd never been like. You know proper skin at all and i shaved all of my hair off and it was really it was so liberating. It was just really really nice, but also very cold. It was really cold until you felt the wind caressing, your scalp you've never felt cold. My friend but um then i started you know, then i i really quite got enamored with the shot cropped like super super short hair. Look, but the problem with that is maintaining it. You kind of have to shave it literally almost every two to three days, because when you cut your hair, that close that's when you realize how quickly it grows, so it was growing so fast, it's like! Oh! I don't want this. This is too. This is too much for me having to keep on shaving it. So then i started letting it grow a bit. So i was like okay i'll. Let it grow a bit and i can have like a box cut or something like that short back inside. But the problem was that one when my hair was that short, it really emphasized how much more silver i had in my hair, and i didn't want that - i was freaking out. I was like no, no, no, i don't want, and i was like hang on my hair is short. I can stop dying it right and i was like i'm gon na turn. My hair is all gon na turn silver within a few years anyway. Why? Not? Just you know: accelerate myself there by dyeing my hair platinum blonde, which oh, my gosh, the things that i did to my hair um yeah. So i was putting a hydrogen peroxide cream to strip my hair of its color and then bleaching it, and i got to a point where the only way that i could get it to be platinum wide was, if i did the bleaching process twice, one after the Other so i would do it on say, tuesday and then the next one, oh and then on wednesday. The next day. I would then do it and that's what would get it nice and white like proper, shiny white, and it was nice and it would be nice for just about a week before my dark roots would start showing and then i'd have to do the process again and At the time i was kind of like: oh, i don't care, my hair is super short anyway, i'm not growing it. So it's going to be fine, but you have a scalp. Your hair comes from the scalp. You know and messing up my scalp as well uh. So yes, so i did uh quite some damage, but i got to a point where i was like after 10 days. It would need to be done up in order to maintain the you know, the pristine um white thing, so i was just like. Oh, you know what i can't keep doing this to myself, because by that point my hairline was begin, like the hair. Follicles were beginning to be reduced in number and i have a pretty healthy hairline. It'S now sort of like repairing itself, but this used to be super super bushy um, but yeah. So i was like okay, we can't keep going on like this. This is unsustainable and i was like how about this sounds crazy. But how about you just accept that you have grey hair no, and i was like okay, let's, let's give that a go right because it seemed just the easier thing to do so that i didn't have to do the shaving. You know the cutting of my hair and all that um, and so you know i even i just cut off all of the platinum blonde hair, which was really dry and unpleasant. Um really like can do false, because all of that bleaching just wasn't good for it. So i wasn't too sad to see it go and then my hair started growing again and again i freaked out at how many uh silvers i had. I would be fine until somebody would mention a negative comment where they'd be like. Oh, i didn't realize that you were that old and i'd be like i'm only 30 39. You know and then i kind of like freaked out, and so i was like. Okay, now i'm going to dye my hair again by this time, i'm going to die red red seems to be like something. You know that when it starts grow, the roots wouldn't show up as much, and so i dyed my hair red, which was all lovely and really nice. Until i went swimming and chlorine and head, i do not go hand in hand, because i was training for a triathlon, then, and i hadn't brought my cap for the swimming session and yeah just completely ruined the dye job, which was very, very frustrating. Because, then, i was walking around with this kind of like ginger, whatever brass yellowy toned, um hair, and so i was like um yeah you're done, you're done baby girl. You need to stop uh dyeing your hair. So that's how i ended up stopping uh with it, and that was probably about a year ago. I'Ll have to check if it's not a year, it's about just a little bit over a year and then i was like it's just going to grow out. But i didn't want to cut my hair again, so i just let it grow out, and so over the past year i have had hair that had the ends that had been dyed and as of last week on sunday, i did the final trim that removed all Of them - and now this is my hair silvered in its crowning glory. So one of the things that i worried a lot about going gray about letting my hair go gray was that i was worried that you know the silver gray color. It'S a cool tone and i tend to favor warm colors warm up tones, and so i was just a little bit worried about that, but guess what there was nothing to worry about, because i haven't had to change much with regards to my makeup. But in fact i feel like my pink lipsticks are more popping because they've got this as well to frame them and yeah i've just been loving it, and you know i can still be vibrant. I can still be vital and i can still look attractive with my hair like this. Yes, i still do get um a few negative comments here and there, which i now just take, is you know i realize that i don't have to take that on board just because they perceive that women of a certain age aren't supposed to allow their gray hair To show that's not on me, that's on them, so i just you know i just accepted so when some people's you know, i'm like wait. How old are you sometimes i'll, just panic and just like i'm 63 or i'm 73, you know um or sometimes, if it's been asked in a considerate way in a polite way. I'Ll explain that i have premature gray hair that i inherited from my father and i'm happy with my hair. My hair is right now super healthy, it's bouncy, it's light, it's got movement and i enjoy it very much and so yeah. That is my gray hair. Transitioning story: i'm 41 years old. Well, i'm gon na turn, 41 soon and in another few years i'm probably going to have a full head of these lovely silvers. Thank you so much for watching um yeah. I will see you in the next video guys until then. Take care bye,