This morning, doing my hair while simultaneously editing my online grocery order — an entirely ordinary domestic juggling act — I caught sight of the silver tide washing in at my roots.
Not a discreet suggestion of grey anymore, nor a few pale strands easily folded back into the blonde, but a silver current running through the colour I have known for years, albeit not my own.
The discovery was quite accidental. In a clumsy sleight of hand, attempting to accomplish my multitasking magic act, I somehow flipped the camera on my computer screen into selfie mode. There I was, unexpectedly looking back at myself, the sea change suddenly, unmistakably apparent.
I smiled. And instinctively pressed the shutter.
Then I returned to the business of editing my shopping trolley and curling my hair, until I had checked both out — my grocery order and my appearance.
Two photographs now tell the story of that unremarkable morning. In the first, my hair is half done and wonderfully unruly, silver bright along the parting, the warmer blonde curling and lifting around it. In the second, I have managed, more or less, to coax it into shape.
I am smiling. I look like myself. Perhaps that is the important part.
Curiously, looking at those photographs, I am not wishing to look younger. I find myself wondering what it might mean to look more fully myself.
I turn sixty in November.
Even writing that feels momentous. Sixty once belonged to another generation, to women who seemed somehow fully formed, certain of themselves and their place in the world. My grandma and grandad belonged to the over-sixties club. Acquaintances went on package holidays for the over-sixties. When I was a child, sixty was the age at which you were awarded a bus pass.
Yet here I am, approaching that same milestone, still changing, still adapting to change, still imagining, making, wondering what comes next.
I find myself increasingly uninterested in disguising the evidence of age, yet equally unwilling to accept the dreary notion that growing older requires us to become less visible, less playful, less sensual, less interested in beauty, clothes, hair, colour, or the pleasure of looking in a mirror and recognising ourselves there.
My hair carries another story too.
My mum was a professional hairdresser, and for almost my entire life she has done my hair.
That sentence looks almost absurdly simple on the page. It is not simple at all.
Mum is now in her mid-eighties. Across nearly sixty years she has cut my hair, coloured it, shaped it, worried over it, occasionally disagreed with me about it, and known it in ways I probably never have.
I had wispy, fine blonde hair as a child. I can plainly remember my Nana — Mum’s mum — tutting imperiously one day, “Is that the best you can do, Julia? I thought you were supposed to be a hairdresser.”
Years later, a curly perm in my teens ended in tears when brushing it too vigorously left me looking remarkably like a ceiling duster. Not every hairstyle was a triumph.
Yet through all those years, hair has never existed for me as an ordinary salon transaction. I have never grown accustomed to entering an unfamiliar space, sitting in front of a stranger and saying, “Do what you think.”
There has always been this intimate continuum between mother and daughter, scissors and tail combs.
When I was seven, Mum shampooed and set my hair for my coronation as ‘royal queen’ on the village carnival float. The royal queen, as I proudly declared. This was no beauty pageant; our school float told the story of the investiture of the Prince of Wales. Adding to my excitement, my best friend Lucy was Prince Charles! I know now that my selection owed something to my headmaster’s sympathy following my recent diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes. But I know, too, that it was an act of kindness. Mr Lewis made my cardboard crown himself.
And twenty years ago, on my wedding day, it was Mum who coiffured my hair once again, resting a crystal tiara she had made for me amongst my soft blonde curls.
Aveda had already been part of my life for many years by the time Neil and I married.
I had discovered the brand in my late teens, when I was becoming increasingly aware of the cruelty associated with animal testing in the cosmetics industry, and beginning to question the wider environmental consequences of the products we used so unquestioningly.
My concern for other living creatures had begun much earlier. I was very young when I discovered that storybook friends like Pigling Bland and Jemima Puddle-Duck were also creatures served up for dinner. I gave up eating meat.
As a teenager, I was something of an activist, although gathering signatures on a petition to ban seal hunting didn’t feel like activism. It simply felt like the right thing — the only thing — to do.
I wanted beauty, colour, fragrance, the pleasure of caring for myself and expressing who I was. But I needed to feel that those pleasures did not come at the expense of other living things.
Aveda appealed to that awakening. Its botanical philosophy, its emphasis on environmental responsibility and the beautiful plant-based fragrances of its products seemed to bring together things I was growing up to understand were important to me.
So, in the weeks leading up to our wedding, I indulged in all manner of Aveda treatments, redeeming loyalty points accumulated over the years.
A beauty adviser I had come to know through the Aveda concession at Jolly’s in Bath — a beautiful person herself, who had become a friend — was going to do my make-up on the wedding day. Aveda cosmetics, naturally.
Unfortunately, she got caught up in traffic.
So too did many of our guests.
Unbeknownst to me, I had arranged our wedding on the same day as both the Great Dorset Steam Fair and an air pageant. The road network had snagged several of our wedding guests in its net that day.
Meanwhile, the organist at the church, with a mischievous sense of humour all his own, reportedly struck up Get Me to the Church on Time for the assembled congregation.
I did my own make-up, having first to unpack my suitcase, zipped up in readiness for our honeymoon departure to Nova Scotia in the early hours of the following day. Why, of all places, I had chosen to bury my make-up bag at the very bottom of the case remains a mystery to me.
Mum did my hair, setting it in soft curls once again.
And I arrived fashionably late.
Now, twenty years on, as another milestone approaches, I find myself returning to Aveda for an altogether different kind of celebration.
And there, waiting in my loyalty account, were 64,260 points.
An absurdly specific numerical record of purchases, bottles, treatments, choices and years. I hadn’t been keeping count, although countless empty bottles have amassed at the back of the wardrobe, awaiting their turn in Aveda’s Full Circle Takeback Programme.
When I discovered the total, I was more tickled than impressed. Then, on reflection, I began to consider what it represented.
Loyalty is a curious thing when translated into numbers. It looks transactional on a screen, yet behind it lies a story and the passing of time.
Aveda has accompanied me through a substantial portion of my adult life.
Nature has always been integral to the way I understand myself. Sometimes profoundly, stirring thought and feeling, sometimes abstractly, I have looked to the natural world as something of a spiritual mentor, guiding me beyond its grounded, earthly presence. That relationship has found expression, and continues to find expression, in the things I make.
My work as an artist and writer has evolved through landscape — fields and woodlands, butterflies and wildflowers, weather and memory. I have spent much of my life looking closely at things that are easily overlooked, finding beauty in the bedraggled as readily as in the bud and in the blossoming, in what is fading as much as in what is pristine or new.
Perhaps that is why I find myself questioning the language we use around ageing.
There is so much that quietly suggests correction. Anti-ageing. Concealing. Lifting. Tightening. Covering. Restoring. Returning. The implication seems always to be that the desirable direction of travel is backwards.
I do not want to travel backwards.
I remember tracing the wrinkles and raised veins on my grandma’s hands, following them with my fingers as though they were tree roots. I would gently press and release them, fascinated by the movement beneath her skin and by how slowly her wrinkles settled back into place.
As a child, I thought she might be becoming a tree. Perhaps we all did, eventually.
I don’t remember finding anything troubling in those signs of age. They fascinated me.
And yet, approaching sixty, I am not entirely free of the vanities of my younger self. Nor would I wish to be.
I still want colour, to feel vibrant — not least when, in my physical self, I feel dull. I want to dress expressively, to wear interesting clothes, earrings, fragrance, lipstick. I want to experiment, to feel attractive, to enjoy the woman looking back at me in the mirror.
But the rituals of looking after myself have changed.
My health, my eyesight and my hearing have altered in ways I would never have chosen. There are things I once did without thinking that now require ingenuity, patience, or a willingness to laugh at myself.
Applying eye make-up, for instance, has become something of a feat of engineering. With so little sight in my left eye, even mascara demands a degree of dexterity that I cannot always summon. And on days when I need frequent eye drops, the result can be less alluring than anticipated: mascara dissolving into pools beneath my eyes.
There are times when I simply leave it off. There are times, following surgery, when I have no choice.
Yet I don’t want the adaptations I’ve had to make to become a quiet surrender of the pleasures that still matter to me.
I don’t want to preserve an earlier version of myself, nor do I want to disappear into some prescribed idea of what a woman approaching sixty ought to look like.
Perhaps this is why my hair has begun to feel so significant.
It has been changing quietly for years, the silver gradually finding its way through the blonde. Until that accidental encounter with my reflection, I had scarcely appreciated how far the tide had come in.
Looking again at those photographs, I find myself drawn to the differences in colour. Cool silver at the roots, warmer blonde through the lengths, unexpected tones catching the light. Not yet a deliberate arrangement, but something that might become one.
I wonder what would happen if, instead of covering the silver, I invited someone to work with it.
For almost sixty years, Mum has been the person who has cut, coloured and styled my hair. The prospect of placing it in someone else’s hands feels strangely momentous. It is not a rejection of everything she has done for me. It is an opportunity to discover something neither of us has yet imagined.
And perhaps that is what has brought me to the Aveda flagship in London.
I have booked an appointment for later this month, redeeming 30,000 of those accumulated loyalty points for a Top to Toe experience. A colourist named John will consider what might be possible, while André, an Advanced Creative Director, will take responsibility for the cut.
I’ve sent photographs ahead of my visit. One taken in Stockholm, surrounded by green. Another at home, without make-up or earrings, sitting amongst the objects and fragments of my creative life. And now there are these latest photographs, taken quite by accident, with the silver showing through.
They are not photographs of a woman asking to look younger.
They are simply photographs of me, as I am.
I have no particular hairstyle in mind. No photograph of somebody else whose appearance I hope to borrow. I want to hear what these two people, with their experience and imagination, might see when they look at me.
Perhaps I won’t like their suggestions. Perhaps I’ll lose my nerve. Perhaps I’ll come home looking much as I did when I left.
But I hope not.
There is something exciting about the possibility of being surprised by my own reflection.
And if, by the time November arrives, the silver at my roots has become part of a new arrangement of colour and shape, I hope it will feel less like something that has been done to me and more like something I’ve chosen.
A sea change, perhaps.
Not a turning back, but a turning towards whatever comes next.
