Generational Attitudes About Beauty And Gray Hair

Hey it's beth. It'S spring. I don't know how you guys are doing wherever you are, but i'm in the northern hemisphere and i live in a six growing zone and this week our crocuses came up. I couldn't be happier here's a picture of them. They look so pretty it's amazing to go from just the grays and browns and whites of winter and then have the very first thing that blooms my garden, be this incredibly rich, beautiful purple, it's just so thrilling when the when the day comes. So i wanted to share that with you, i'm in my 14 month mark right now, uh with my gray hair and i'm sort of just chilling and letting it grow in. I i sort of i am at this point now, where i don't really like need to go out and seek encouragement, but i do love watching other youtubers with you know in this community, because i think it's, i think it's an awesome community and i recently came Across a video that i really liked that i'm going to link down below by a creator called the gray, indian and her video is called why i transitioned to gray hair and i loved her video. I i'm sort of making this one as um like a natural outcropping of some of her ideas and in that video she talks a little bit about the differences in generation between her mother and her grandmother and the way they approach going gray and you should check Out her video, i don't want to give away all of her insights, but basically she was reflecting on on that and it led me to reflect on it and she - and i are probably in the same generation and what i have been thinking about is my own Sense of style and my own beauty, aesthetic as it relates to my generation and how that sort of is informing my attitude about how i'm going gray compared to maybe how my mother felt and compared to how my grandmother felt and i'm also going to share some Of my um gen x style icons that are that have informed the way i see women and beauty in style. If that sounds interesting to you, please stay tuned thanks. So in my family, it's definitely genetic that we go grey early. I'Ve actually been doing some ancestry work right now, um, looking back and i've been going through old photos of my family, i mean, like super duper old photos from the 1800s of my family and there everybody that i can see on one branch of my family. That goes from my mom to my grandma and that that way, just the white hair is everywhere and it appears to have. I don't know when how far back it goes, but that's that's something that was going to happen to me and it is my genetic heritage and it looks fantastic in these people in photos and i've just kind of relaxed into it and decided that this is like Really who i am and who my ancestors were - and i can just go ahead and do that and it's interesting because you know i'm i'm in my early 40s and i'm making this choice and i'm very comfortable with it. I am perfectly satisfied with the idea that this is what my hair is going to be. It will probably go. Even you know whiter as time goes, i might lose my stripe here, but what i, what i've realized about my natural hair pattern is that it's like pretty punk rock, actually in a way that i haven't ever really experienced like when i was in my teenage years. I was super into rock and roll. I grew up and i graduated from high school in the mid 90s, and at that time it was a really great period of time. If you were in, if you were into music, the 90s were a great time to be alive, and i lived in minneapolis which, at that time had like three alternative radio stations and an incredible music scene. I mean incredible. First ave as a legendary club prince was still alive and milling around town the whole bit. It was a great time to see, live, music and hear new music and we had record stores galore the whole bit. That was like my scene that you could find me at first ave. You could find me at the record store - and i i bring this up at that time, because i was thinking about my style icons from that time, so this was pre, britney spears and backstreet boys. This was the seven or so years of the 90s that were you know, people called it alternative. There was a you know, grunge was a sub genre and there were other really rich genres that were not grunge that were at that time. That would still seem as be lumped in with like alternative music. It was basically the scene, it was varied and there was a ton of talent and there were quite a lot of women to find on the stage and a lot of the way. I think about style and how i want to look and how i want to present in the world. Came from being a young woman and admiring some of the musicians that i that i either did see, live or that i, like always wanted to see, live and haven't gotten to so i wanted to share some of those first, because i think it'll explain some of The other things i wanted to talk about so um, one of the first people that her style just blew me away, was kim gordon and she was one of the lead, the co-leads of sonic youth. She was the bass player and the female vocalist for them, and i think i saw sonic youth, like maybe at least seven times, i've seen them at festivals. I saw them open for rem, i've seen them on their own, i mean just i any chance. I could get to see sonic youth, i would. It was largely because of kim gordon i thought she was unbelievably cool. I couldn't i couldn't handle it. I couldn't handle how cool her outfits were and how she presented on stage and her whole aesthetic and her musicianship. All of it, i i could not get enough of kim gordon and i think something about her um there's a there's, a southern california femme aesthetic that kind of like folds into the new york um art band, that they were that um. That really resonated with me. I'Ve always loved that, so i just wanted to share kim gordon first because she's the one that i that maybe thrilled me the most and i was also really into carrie brownstein and just in general slater kinney. I carrie always kind of stood out to me. She had this kind of like almost preppy, but also um hardcore hardcore prep punk rock prep. I loved that too. That was some. There was something about that that seemed um to fit with what i was like to the collegiate kind of vibe, but not not too dusty. You know a little still mess you up. If you need to, i just. I thought she had it going on for sure too. I also loved lauren hill. I loved her in the fuji's and i loved her her solo album. The miss education of lauren hill was really important for me and i was even listening to it just this weekend. I was revisiting it and really really vibing hard. With that record, she had an incredible style too. She had this sort of like new york, um sort of hip-hop sort of rasta look. That was her own though you know, i don't think anyone could mimic it and it it fit with her music and fit with her her brilliance and i loved it. It wasn't something that i'd seen quite like that before and i just loved watching her on stage and seeing her perform. It was fantastic. I also um really liked pj harvey um pj harvey is wild. Her style was wild. She could pretty much do anything. She threw even um. This is cool. She'S got this like funky kind of crow on her head, making her look a little edgier, and she also has some really great shots. If you want to like look her up, she also there's like really good images of her with the bright blue kind of 1950s eye with the heavy eyeliner. It'S a really good look on her as well, so she could do this kind of um. She could do a mod thing. She could do a haunted english, baroness. You know that type of thing as well. I just think she had this incredibly um kind of like spooky and knowing vibe that was erotic and just ice cold super cool, i loved her style, and then i also, unless they've included, someone who i continue to admire on a daily basis, erica badu, she um. What can you do? The first time i saw her ever was, i saw her. Image was on the cover of batoism, and then i got her live album and she had these, like amazing kind of very regal head wraps, and i she caught my attention and then throughout time, she's had this this, like um afrofuturist vibe. That is like a little space age, a little a little witchy. You know just a 100 artist, and i love i love seeing what erica badu will do next, both with her music and with her style aesthetic. So i bring these ladies up to say that these are people that i really admire. I i can admire a lot of forms of beauty, but there's something about this artistic, individual and very strong expression of these, these women's sense of femininity and how they put themselves together. Resonated with me, it resonates more with me than some of the more polished looks that came after that, like the the obvious examples are like the kardashians that they're, beautiful and they're awesome like in terms of that aesthetic, i love what they have done for making curves Part of the conversation again and not just something to be, you know hidden, so i'm super grateful to them for that, but that that general look to me has has not thrilled me in the way that some of these types of style icons have, and i bring That all up to say, i think, that's, i think, that's partly why i am finding myself so okay with my hair, going gray and and kind of like even delighted to find that it's so stripey so like i've got it down now. But if you can, you can see if i, if i put it up, if i, if i put it in a bun or something like that, it's really quite stripey, and it makes me if you've ever seen, images of daphne guinness it makes me feel like i'm On this road to to look like daphne guinness, i you know i wish, but this this is what i'm i guess trying to evoke is that my generation was okay with subverting norms. My generation, i'm gen x, i've also been put in a category called xenial, where we had analog childhoods and then digital adulthoods. So i'm in that, like late 70s bracket and when i was growing up, that was my friends who were in like the music scene. With me and all that people were getting pretty heavy piercings, they were the sometimes the first piercings that people had seen. I know now it's really pretty normal, not necessarily mainstream, but really widespread, and people haven't seen it for a long time, but in 1992 93 94. You know if you've got a bull ring under your nose or you've got your eyebrow pierced. That might be the first time anybody had ever seen that, especially in minneapolis minnesota. So my my friends who were doing this were breaking norms and really upsetting people and their families. You know by doing this type of thing and we were also getting more tattoos than the previous generation had. I think the previous generation is a little more limited group of people who tended to get tattoos from my mom's generation, but in my generation we started to expand that it became much more common for people to have a tattoo and now in 2021. I would say if you meet adults, it'd be pretty rare anymore to find somebody who doesn't have one. I bring that all up to say we didn't mind. Um, like i said, subverting norms or kind of you know, rocking things up, making our look a little harder. We were still, i remember, interested in looking good and feeling glamorous and and feeling like. We were happy with the way we looked, but it was on different terms. You know, i remember feeling like it was on our terms. I remember wearing uh combat boots. I would wear combat boots with fishnets. With a you know: black denim mini skirt. You know i had. I had a. I had a whole lot of outfits and my mother and i thought about it a lot so my mom was from the previous generation. She was the baby boomer and she grew up sewing her own clothes and they were beautiful, like if i look at photos of my mom from her high school and like early adulthood, when she was making a lot of her own clothes, she was making dresses that Looked like what jackie kennedy was wearing and her prom dresses were just exactly what you'd want to see out of an early 60s prom album huge taffeta, beautiful right like she had this tailored polished, extremely smart, aesthetic, her hair was done. Her skin looked great. Her shoes were polished, her clothes were ironed and for her to have me in the house, starting to shop in second-hand stores and maybe like tear some fishnets i wasn't supposed to have in the first place. She wasn't into it. Just put it that way. She was not into what i was trying to do and it's kind of funny, because i think that that generation is also one that seems to be um. Just i'm just looking to think about the women that i know specifically, i'm not making totally sweeping generalizations. I'M really just like specifically thinking about the women. I know they were slower to stop dyeing their hair like a lot of them. I think, even in their 70s, our 60s and 70s are even still kind of like doing the platinum thing over their white hair, which is fine, but there's a, i think, there's a different sense that um, you know a little they're. I think my mom is always willing just to put in a little more effort, whereas i was sometimes willing to like let it go the way it was gon na go. You know, i think she was trying to polish me up a little bit sometimes and then my grandma before her. She was extremely um dressed like you, you could sneak up on her even in her late 80s. If you go over to her house on any given day, you'd find her in a matching outfit with like a jewelry set and her hair done, you could know you would never find her looking a mess unless she was sick, that's it. Otherwise. She put herself together. Every day, but at the same time she didn't really wear makeup. I don't think i ever saw my grandmother put on eye shadow. She would might wear a little bit of blush and she might wear a little bit of pale pale pale, lipstick like on easter or something like that, but she wasn't wearing makeup and she was wearing clothes that did suit her, but they were undoubtedly in sort of That, like grandma category and she had no qualms about putting herself in that category and i um i loved her. Look like i still looking looking back at her her ladylike aesthetic was um admirable and something worth replicating in a lot of ways. She used to wear this like dove gray fedora. She put it on a kind of like at this angle with her snow white hair. Under it, oh, my god, it was, it was a look and she wore you, know pink silks and all of that type of thing. So she she really it wasn't that it would. The term like the old lady look um. There was a glamour about it and there was a level of presence about it that was to die for, and i i will always acknowledge the fact that my grandma is also one of my style icons. I, i think often about like how would how would my grandma have done this or that, so it's funny the way that works. I do think the gray hair trend we're seeing right now is more than just a trend, and i don't necessarily think it's passing, and one of the things i wanted to say was a huge thank you to the millennials and the ones who are in. I don't know if gen z has been doing this much, but i know for sure the millennials have been a huge contributor to my understanding, of how great gray hair can really look, because it's the millennials that i think i would say, are the ones correct me. If i'm wrong, of course, but they're, the ones who were voluntarily dyeing their hair gray, who are going to getting double processed blonde treatments in the salon and putting in gray rinses, i think for a lot of us who are like doggedly covering our natural gray. It was surprising and delightful to see young women rocking gray hair in a way that was sexy, glamorous youthful, and i think i can just speak for myself to say that did light a spark of consciousness in me that there is maybe a way to let your Hair be gray and still be as vivacious and stylish as you want to be, so i i give a ton of thanks to the generation coming up behind us for um. I think for waking me up. I really appreciate that so shout out to the millennials, and also, i guess, i'm i'll throw a gen z in there too, for just their general consciousness. I have a feeling from what i'm seeing from gen z that anything that you want to be. You can be - and i think some of that fear that we had in our generation and the generation before that it wasn't okay to show signs of aging. I have a feeling that gen z is already over that, may it be so right anyway, um thanks again to the uh, the great indian, for just making a good video or not collabing, or anything like that. I just really appreciated her insight and i wanted to share mine with you anyway. Hope you guys are all doing well out there. I hope you're enjoying spring, if you're in the northern hemisphere or the start of fall, if you're in the in the southern hemisphere. It'S nice to see some change. Talk to you soon, bye! You