Grey areas

Just recently, like a month ago, I was thinking how well my hair was doing in the not-going-grey department. There were a couple of grey hairs, true, but that was all. Maybe three. All easily removed.

(Aside: For years I wished the hairs in the centre of my monobrow were not so black. Well, actually, I wished there were no hairs there at all, but if they had to exist then why couldn't they be blonde and fine? Then they started turning grey, which didn't alarm me in the OMG-my-eyebrows-are-turning-grey-I-am-old sense – because these particular hairs had done a lot more growing than any others by virtue of being plucked all the time, so it just seemed logical that they would go grey first – but nevertheless wasn't exactly like my fantasy of non-black mid-eyebrow hairs either.

Fantasy: hairs that would be less noticeable, meaning a lower likelihood that people would see any unplucked hairs. Reality: hairs that are less noticeable, meaning a lower likelihood that I find them while short, meaning I only see them when they're so long they catch the light, and holy toledo everyone else must have been blinded by the light reflected from the forest of hairs above my nose.)

(Another aside: this difficulty of seeing unwanted non-black facial hairs worries me somewhat for the future... will I be able to see and pluck those three chin hairs in a timely manner once they turn grey, or will people be stealing sidelong glances to gauge their length?)

And then, just before we went to Romania, overnight there were grey hairs everywhere. Including in my fringe.

(Another aside: So the explanation for grey hairs is that they simply lack pigmentation because the cells that store pigment in the hair follicle, melanocytes, start to die off. OK, fine, I can understand the biology of this. But then why are the grey hairs also about 10 times thicker than my regular head hairs?? Which is another lovely example of the irony that graces our lives, given that in my younger years I also fervently wished to not have such fine hair.)

I hastily plucked out all the ones I could see, but I knew there must be many more hiding at the back, or under other hairs. And indeed, every now and again I see a glint from one of these sneakier ones. But still, even though the speed at which new grey hairs are appearing is a little alarming, it's not like I have to embrace the grey. Hello hairdresser!

But then yesterday, it got worse.

I found a grey pube.

A grey bush is something that had honestly not occurred to me. And if it had, well, it wouldn't have occurred to me that I would have one in my 40s.

Awesome. Just... awesome.