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I discovered that the personality-enhancing aspect of my hair extended well beyond a sense of theatrical role-playing. I found that if I felt depressed, I could go and brighten up the hue and actually make myself feel brighter. When I felt like I wasn't getting enough attention from my boyfriend (and future husband), I could shift my color and, in my mind's eye, become instantly more alluring. I'm not so sure that this strategy actually worked, but it always made me feel as if I were taking control. There was nothing like transforming myself overnight from redhead to brunette or back again to make me feel like a new person. It was a regular cosmetic rebooting.

Hair color was something I could control easily, definitively -- managing the color of my hair was my equivalent to taking Paxil. I discovered that when I changed my hair color, voilà, I'd move on -- imagining, hoping, that by modifying the way I presented myself to the world, I was somehow actually dealing with whatever issues or uncertainties were confronting me at the moment.

On my fortieth birthday, in some I-want-to-be-a-rock-star-and- I'm-not-getting-older moment of fantastic denial, I indulged in my most dramatic and least successful coloring episode. I dyed my hair jet-black. Other than a few dutiful years of piano lessons, I'd never been musical -- never played an instrument or sung in any kind of group. But at forty I chose to become thoroughly depressed over the fact that now I knew I would never become a Beatle. Yes, a Beatle. Insane in several respects? Yes! But at age nine in 1965, I'd seen them play live in my hometown, Kansas City. That scene -- teenagers gone wild, and sexy, sophisticated, foreign boys (with cool, long dark hair) being adored -- became my benchmark (other than The Mod Squad) for a certain kind of glam living, one that would lead me out of my suburban Midwestern tapioca life.

But my 1995 fake-rocker black hair didn't, of course, magically deliver me a recording contract or global adoration. Rather, it served to underscore my true age in unattractive ways -- the black washed me out and added gray shadows to my face. My friend Larry Doyle, who's a comedy writer, announced in his deadpan fashion the moment he saw me, "You look like your evil twin." And both of my children, then five and seven, actually cried the evening I came home with the new color. Not precisely my goal.

I lived with that mistake for a long time because you cannot simply wash ebony color out of your hair. As an emergency remedial adaptation, I went back and had my colorist layer mahogany dye into the black and then, chastened by the entire experiment, settled into a conservative, acceptable, middle-aged brownish.

And from then on I went on absolute hair-color autopilot, the opposite of my previous decade or so of flagrant dabbling. My forties' hair strategy became all about maintaining the status quo -- consistent hair color meant nothing in my life was really changing. No aging, no anxiety I couldn't deal with, no friends divorcing or family members and friends dyeing . . . everything was just fine. Until I looked hard at that photograph three years ago and everything wasn't fine, at least not as far as the way I looked was concerned. Even though I've never once fudged my age, I simply wasn't prepared to look my age. And I thought that if I had my natural hair color, whatever it might be, I'd instantly look older. What was the big deal about looking my age? This was the real crux of my dilemma in wanting to present a more authentic version of myself to the world. At least since the flappers of the 1920s, we've valued extravagant youthfulness as the embodiment of all that is American -- new nation, new ideals, youthful optimism and can-do-ism, Lindy Hopping and Boogalooing and Frugging our way through life to keep refreshing the sense that we are always creating ourselves anew. Even if we aren't. By keeping my gray "secret," not allowing my hair to visibly age, I was able to feel permanently thirty-four.

It never occurred to me that my light-sucking fake dark-brown hair might have had a subtle but even more profound aging effect. I chose not to register the fact that hair dye, inevitably, faintly stains the skin around the hairline, tipping off anyone who looks closely that what you are presenting is a simulation of youth. As I approached fifty, I realized I was exhausted by the tyrannical upkeep, the enormous investment of time and money, just to seem younger -- or at least not older. I was married, I was self-employed, my kids were almost adults. That equation no longer computed.

So how hideous could my natural color be -- whatever it was -- compared to liberation?

1 With the exception of members of my family, people mentioned in the book without surnames are pseudonymous. 2 If you'd like to see this photo, go to www.AnneKreamer.com/book.html.

Copyright © 2007 by Anne Kreamer

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