Do you know who Jeff Chandler is?
Unless you are a hard-core
movie fan you wouldn't know him. He was one of the leading men of the
fifties and sixties who looked equally good in uniforms and cowboy
boots. And he had great salt-and-pepper gray hair. That was his
distinguishing mark.
In his later years Cary Grant also got the
movie goers warm up to the idea that gray hair could be a cool thing
indeed, suggesting experience and maturity in a man.
The
evolutionary imperative selected dark hair without a single gray strand
in it because it signaled "good fresh genes" while gray hair translated as “old age" and "depleted genetic material."
However,
within an urban environment, gray hair could also translate as “money"
and thus could appeal to the nurturing instincts of young females of
child-bearing age.
Looking at the matter from Edward Wilson's
“Sociobiology" perspective, gray hair put the young females in a bind
by broadcasting two conflicting signals simultaneously -- “damaged
genes" and “wealthy protector."
These days, in this age of
international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, outsourcing,
downsizing, bird-flu and global warming, perhaps the “nurturing" aspect
of gray hair is winning the subliminal argument.
Here is Taylor Hicks, the winner of the fifth round of American Idol contest, and his prematurely gray hair.
Did
you know that a total of 60 million viewers voted for him? That also
means 60 million votes for gray hair, hurray! It's in for sure.
And then there's Anderson Cooper of CNN, a very energetic and serious young (38yrs) professional with a “nurturing" signal.
There
are a lot of brainy creative women who for quite some time showed up in
public with prominent gray hair as well. Writer Susan Sontag, for
example. Or the singer Emmylou Harris, 59. It did not hurt their career
one tiny bit.
If your hair is graying, celebrate. You're in.
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