Did you know hair dye goes straight from the sink to our groundwater?

Friday was Earth Day, a great day to remind people about environmentalism.  Going gray is an easy way to contribute to going green efforts.  It is also a good way to save money.

Here are a few facts to consider, from WalletPop:

• A whopping 70 percent of consumers color their hair to cover up their grays, said Meri Scals, founder of AllBeautyAnswers.com.
• Consumers nationwide send an average of $61.73 on permanent hair dye each time they go to the salon, estimated the Professional Beauty Association.  Do the math (touch-ups eight times a year) and that’s almost $500 a year.
• Dyeing at home costs between $7 and $10 each time.  Though not nearly as costly as going to a professional, those figures still add up.

Imagine saving anywhere from $50 to $500 a year.  Talk about a nice rainy day fund.  Just $50 can buy a couple of bottles of Phyto Phytargent or Aveda Blue Malva.

On top of the savings, you’d be treating yourself better by going gray and not slathering chemicals on top of your head each month.  Plus, there would be far less water pollution originating from your drain—and who needs water pollution weighing down their conscience?

According to a recent study, most women start to feel old around age 29, but men don’t think they’re over the hill until they’ve lived twice as many years, until they’re 58.  The huge age gap is troubling, especially when we consider the fact that women on average typically live slightly longer than men do.

Why the big difference?  In the poll, women cited their first gray hair, drooping “assets,” loss of glow in their skin and motherhood as indications of old age.  Meanwhile, most men didn’t feel old until they could no longer perform sexually.

An article by AOL Health summed it up quite simply: “Experts say the gender gaps in the perception of aging are tied to society’s different standards of youth and beauty for men and women.”

Double standard, anyone?

Time magazine said the results of the study are “more than a little depressing.”  The article suggested, “Before you’re 30, ladies? Really?  Perhaps it’s time to cut yourselves some slack, à la the men of the world.”

Gray hair, motherhood… these are no reasons to feel old.  They are reasons to feel alive.  Celebrate your age, love your laugh lines and embrace the gray.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Going Gray Blog readers!  Do you have green in your wardrobe today?  Fortunately, if you’ve started going gray, then you already have green in your life.

The simple act of ditching the hair dye can help better the world around you.  Studies show that not only is hair dye unhealthy for the people using it, but it also contributes to endangering our environment.

An Alive.com article summarizes different ways hair dye can hurt the environment:

“What happens to the portion of hair dye you don’t use?  It gets discarded as trash to accumulate in a landfill somewhere.  Those chemicals can leech into the ground and affect both local and distant ecosystems, as chemicals are known to travel.  You’re also sending synthetic hair dye down the drain when you dip your head.  Those chemicals do end up somewhere—often where you’d least suspect.”

According to TheGreenDove.com, the synthetic chemicals in hair dye that is washed down the drain ultimately end up in waterways, soils and even our bloodstreams.  How does hair dye we send down the drain end up back in our bodies?

“You wouldn’t believe how many toxic chemicals are being rinsed from colorists’ sinks into the waterways,” John Masters told WholeLiving.com.  Those chemicals, like ammonia, hydrogen peroxide and phenylenediamine, end up in our groundwater supplies—and even more troubling, freshwater fish.  Suddenly the surf in “surf and turf” doesn’t quite sound so appealing.

So if you haven’t already, ditch the dye.  Go green today by going gray.

The X-Men character Storm wasn't just born with mutant powers. She also has a widow's peak, a common example of human genetics at work (Halle Berry's lack of a widow's peak in the X-Men movies is considered a subtle flub). Storm has some "shocking" silver hair, but no frizz despite spending all that time in the sky - lucky gal!

You may already know that the age you start to go gray is heavily dependent on genetics.  But this shouldn’t be too surprising.  The truth is, most of the characteristics of our hair are preprogrammed.

The presence of hair on your fingers, a widow’s peak in your hairline or even male-pattern baldness are all dominant traits that are inherited.  “Dominant” means the trait perseveres when passed from one generation to another, as opposed to “recessive.”  These examples have long been used to teach genetics to junior high and high school students (though their simplicity is questionable).

Natural hair color, like eye color and skin tone, is also inherited.  This doesn’t mean the environment can’t affect hair color.  But for the most part, dark is dominant while blonde, light and red hair is recessive.  The wide and varied hair color spectrum comes from the presence of just two kinds of melanin: eumelanin and phomelanin.  Of course, lack of this melanin introduces an entirely new palette with beautiful shades of white, silver and gray.

In some disciplines, the color gray is associated with change and uncertainty.  Sounds like going gray, doesn’t it?  But other discourses have their own, more confident, interpretations of the color gray.

For those of you in the process, you know one common interpretation of the color gray already: transitioning.  While transitioning to a full head of gray hair is often the most challenging part of going gray, this symbol is actually about smooth transitions and making life easier.  Think of it this way: would you rather transition with temporary skunk hair and salt-and-pepper hair, or would you be partial to a blunt black-and-white-striped zebra look?  (Edgy, sure, but it’s probably not a practical everyday look for most.)

Along that same line of thought is the idea that gray represents balance.  Visually, it plays middleman to black and white.  (Maybe that’s why some Native American cultures consider gray to be a symbol of friendship.)  There’s a reason we say “Gray is the New Black.”  Gray looks great next to many other colors.  (If you haven’t read it before, check out our blog post “What to Wear with Your Gray Hair.”)  Gray is the wise voice of reason in a sea of clashing colors.

Life is rarely black and white.  Most of the time, life is some shade of gray.  After all, it’s only natural.

• World-renowned womanizer James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) puts himself in a woman’s shoes in this short by WeAreEquals.org, featuring the voice of one of our favorite gray-haired actresses, Judi Dench. •

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, and Going Gray Blog loves the 2011 theme, “Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women.”

Our blog’s tagline is “Celebrating the Right to Choose” because we believe in the woman’s prerogative to the same choices in life that men have.  Whether it is the option to go gray or the decision to pursue higher education, women deserve the same opportunities as their male counterparts.

If you’d like to take part, there are hundreds of events being hosted in the United States today in celebration of International Women’s Day and thousands all over the world.  Some events will take place online, including 24 hours of special radio programming at kboo.fm/listen.

To learn more about the history and events celebrating International Women’s Day, visit www.InternationalWomensDay.com or the United Nations page.

You may have heard before that it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile (though according to plastic surgeon David H. Song, this only applies if we don’t count our eye muscles).  You also may have heard that laughing can make you live longer because it reduces stress and anxiety.

Who knows if either of these physical incentives are true?  In any case, they certainly can’t hurt.  If you are smiling or laughing, there’s a good chance it’s because you’re having a good time.  So here are a few gray hair funnies to help you get those smile muscles working:

“She was what we used to call a suicide blond — dyed by her own hand.” – Saul Bellow

“I am a Gray who is very afraid of dyeing.” – Spalding Gray (on why he won’t use a hair dye product)

“There is only one cure for gray hair.  It was invented by a Frenchman.  It is called the guillotine.” – P.J. Wodehouse

Want more funny hair quotes?  Visit BasicJokes.com.

Valentine’s Day may traditionally be about romance, but the day of love also reminds us to appreciate each of our loved ones, whether it’s by sending your mom a bouquet of flowers, helping your child fill out Spongebob Squarepants Valentine’s Day cards, or even doing a little something special for the person who is always there for you—yourself.

At face value, treating yourself, whether on Valentine’s Day, your birthday or any other day, might appear a little vain.  But don’t confuse self-love with narcissism.  While the latter leads to a sad and lonely death by a reflective pool or water, self-love involves appreciating, accepting and respecting yourself unconditionally.  (And that includes loving your gray hair!)

It’s that sense of self-worth that tells you, “I deserve to be happy.”

Sometimes by putting yourself first, you actually improve the effect you have on other people.  Hence the saying, “You must care for yourself before you can take care of others.”

Mastering the art of self-love has positive effects on many other aspects of life.  Self-love can even make you more fashionable.  Designer Christian Siriano told the Houston Chronicle that people with love on the brain “project themselves better, which makes them look better in what they’re wearing.”  Maybe that’s why our Going Gray readers look so good?

None of us are the center of the universe, but as Kate Winslet’s character in “The Holiday” says, “You’re supposed to be the leading lady of your own life.”

Valentine’s Day might be over, but just as we should appreciate our loved ones all year-round, we should also show ourselves some love every so often.  Go ahead, it’s good for you.  Read LiveStrong.com’s “Unconditional Self-Love and Self-Acceptance” to learn more about the concept of self-love and ways you can achieve it.

After last week’s post about gray hair myths, we asked our Facebook followers if there were any other myths or stories they’d heard about gray hair.  Patricia Blakeslee suggested, “Gray hair makes you look old.”

Old?

The link between aging and going gray is undeniable, but why does the winner of the Gray Hair Word Association game have to be “old”?

Gray is just a color, and gray hair is a physical attribute.  What gray hair means is completely dependent on the eye of the beholder.  There are many people who harbor the opinion that gray hair is beautiful—and can even be sexy.  Just ask Isabella Snow, who had this to say on Hubpages:

“Gray hair is sexy.  …  This is about sex appeal, in the strictest sense of the phrase.  I truly believe gray hair can have it.  …  Just because your hair’s turning color doesn’t mean you suddenly have to look like your grandmother.  If it looks good on you with full color, it can look good without.  So come on, ladies.  Embrace the silver.  You’ve earned the right to be sexy whether or not you’re gray.  And if you believe you are, other people will, too.”

When I meet a woman who has gone gray, I don’t immediately think, “She’s old.”  Nor do I think, “She’s sexy,” or even “She must be wise with all her years.”

Personally, the word I think of when I meet a woman with gray hair, all else equal, is this: “confident.”  It requires a certain level of admirable self-confidence to embrace natural gray hair.  It doesn’t make you look old, it makes you look self-assured.  And that kind of confidence is positively magnetic.

What do you think when you see gray hair, either on yourself or others?

Joy, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires.”  Synonyms include delight, gaiety and bliss.

With these parameters, is it surprising that experts have discovered a correlation between joy and aging?  Recent research shows that after middle age, many people in the United States steadily become happier.  A common shift in priorities seems to take place for middle-aged people.  More tangible goals, such as those related to one’s career, start to matter less and are replaced with goals of personal well-being.

The Economist published a story about post-middle-age happiness in December 2010.  The piece featured “the U-bend of life,” a representation of how our lives’ happiness meters take a dip in our 40s, but rise in the years afterward.  One expert blogger for WebMD suggested a few reasons why the U-bend occurs:

1. As we get older, we gain perspective on what is important and what is not, and we choose to focus our energies on the prior.
2. We become mellower with age and the stress of satisfying others becomes far less important than the wish to satisfy ourselves.
3. As “the rest of our lives” becomes shorter, we let go of the past and focus on the present.

One factor that doesn’t contribute appear to affect the joy of aging?  Money.  The Economist reported:

“Older people tend to be richer.  Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?  The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there.  So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.”

Most of the research supporting the U-bend are based on “happiness polls.”  But neurology also suggests that aging and joy go hand in hand.  According to an EverydayHealth.com webcast on the joy of aging, our brains become less reactive to negative stimuli as we get older.  This results in less negative emotion being felt at all.

So what do you think—is aging a joy?  What are your favorite and least favorite parts of getting older?