Let me start this piece by telling you that the contents are probably not what you think based on the title. While I could probably write an entire piece on the Fifty Shades of Grey series, that is not what this piece is about. This is about hair. Gray hair, in fact.

It was around May 2020, right as COVID and lockdowns were enforced that I decided I could not stand to look at my grown-out gray roots for one more second. I’m pretty sure my grays started showing when I was thirteen or fourteen, but it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I started coloring my hair on the regular. And because I have some superhuman ability to grow hair quickly, I was in my stylist’s chair every four weeks. This was a routine I kept in place up until COVID.

You know what happened next — no stylists could work, therefore no coloring my hair. Well, that’s a lie — I made my husband do box color a few times but I really hated the whole routine. One day I was sitting at my desk and the thought just flew into my head:

What if I went natural? As in, what if I just stopped coloring my hair all together?

It didn’t seem like a totally abnormal idea, so I did what I usually do and turned to Google to find some stories from other women who had stopped the hair coloring cycle themselves. Most of the advice said that the easiest way to do this was to start from scratch. As in, buzz it all off.

Now that scared the hell out of me. I don’t know why, my sister and mom had done it multiple times. I texted my husband before I could lose my nerve and said:

That’s it. I’m done with this hair. We’re buzzing it off tonight.

I waited for his reply of “What? That’s insane!” or “No way, I’m not helping you with that.”

Instead, he simply said, “Cool. Go for it.”

Ah, that sweet, sweet, husband of mine.

That night rolled around and I heard the familiar sound of my husband’s clippers buzzing. It was time. Was I actually going to go forward with it?

Yes. I did.

Lots of things happened after I buzzed all my hair off. Good and bad. Although my stylist said I could pull it off, I wasn’t so sure. I got strange looks when I went out in public. Physically, it felt strange not to be able to twirl a piece of my hair. It also felt liberating and freeing. Then the growing out stage happened and I was miserable. I doubted my decision 100% and cried over the fact that I looked mildly like a growing Bob Ross chia pet. Let’s just say I was grateful that I was expected to stay inside and social distance.

By late summer though, it had grown out just enough for me to start styling it so I didn’t look like I just rolled out of bed. This is the stage where the grays were really started to show although, to the credit of family and friends, they exclaimed, “it still looks pretty brown to me!” As the hair grew, so did my confidence in what I was naturally born with.

Fast forward to nearly a year later and my grays are something of a conversation piece. I’m not kidding — it seems like everywhere I go, someone comments on my hair. My husband and I were signing paperwork one day and the woman helping us kept staring at me.

Okayyy, I thought, maybe I have a booger on my face or something. Maybe I hadn’t lint-rolled enough and evidence of my zoo was showing.

She caught me staring at her, staring at me and she said, “I just have to ask, who colors your hair? It’s beautiful. It’s got so many shades of gray and it’s perfectly blended.”

Though I had gotten compliments in the past, it was the first time someone had thought I’d paid for it!

“Just mother nature,” I said to her.

She was astounded. “People pay good money for hair like that,” she told me.

She wasn’t the only one who thought that, either. Over the last few months, several people had commented something similar.

This piece is not meant to brag about my beautifully gray hair (although I have grown to love it myself), it’s about the fact that it took buzzing all my hair off, going natural and learning how to embrace it to accept that I loved it, too.

I went from hiding my natural hair every chance I could get to openly embracing it — not without lots of tears and regrets, either.

But a year later, when I look in the mirror and see my “sparkles” as my stylist calls it, those naturally highlighted areas of gray, I find myself delighted.

I have a long way to go on the whole self-love and self-acceptance path, but I think embracing my fifty shades of gray has helped me understand that what is natural… what is worth “hiding” can actually be the thing that allows you to fall back in love with what makes you real.

I can’t say I won’t ever color my hair again (I’ve been lusting over that lovely lavender/pastel pink trend going on), but I can say that I won’t ever color it again out of hatred for my grays. They’re a staple of who I am… who I’ve become. And I have to admit — it feels damn good to know that I don’t have to pay a penny for a hair color someone else will pay good money for!