Back to my roots

Makeover Issue 2011

Goodbye, warm mahogany. Hello, silver birch.

August 21, 2011|By Elizabeth Hunnewell

I was 30 when I moved to Paris in 1967. Among the things that intrigued me were people who took their dogs to restaurants and how a short, stout city employee always found you no matter where you were in the Tuileries to demand a few centimes for the painful iron chair you were sitting in. But at the top of the list of intriguing things was the fact that no French woman of any age had any gray hair. Each strand matched the next, shades of brown, black, blond, and red, sometimes red with a hint of purple, and they were never caught with their roots showing. Meanwhile, my gray strands multiplied daily.

My mother had splendid gray and then white hair for as long as I can remember, so I didn’t think much of it when gray started turning up in mine. But in Paris, this was not comme il faut. I was heavily pregnant, so I couldn’t be svelte like French women were or chic, clothes-wise, but I could do something about my hair. My natural color was just brown, but when I emerged from Jacques Dessange, it was Warm Mahogany. My appointment had taken four hours and had cost hundreds of francs, but walking down the Avenue Montaigne, unable to button my coat over my unborn son, I knew it was worth it. The midwife at American Hospital who delivered my baby asked me who did my color. While my husband was away that summer, our upstairs neighbor, M. de Jeannest, whose wife was at the family chateau, invited me out to dinner. For the next 41 years, I colored my hair.

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For a while after we moved back to Wellesley, I tried dyeing it myself. Lady Clairol became my good friend but not my best friend, because after a year or so, my husband noticed my hair was turning green.

“What do you mean green?” I asked. We were out walking on one of those brilliant New England fall days, cold, blue sky, orange leaves floating around us.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, puzzled himself. “Your hair just looks green. Not completely green, but green here and there.”

After that, Raymond, Martha, Emilio, Sophia, and Reza, among others, colored my hair. Some of my friends stick to one hairdresser for life, but each time I realized that my color didn’t make me feel about myself the way my Warm Mahogany had, I made what had become my every-three-weeks appointment in someone else’s chair. Every three weeks comes around very quickly when you have a life to live.