ABSTRACT
Women’s gray hair as an abomination of the body: conceal and pass, or reveal and subvert by Vanessa Cecil, Louise F. Pendry, Jessica Salvatore, and Tim Kurz. Hair colour is a potent signifier of age. In our ageist society, age is a non-concealable stigmatised condition. However, since the 1940s, social and technological changes have made it easy and commonplace to dye one’s hair. Dyeing hair allows the discredited stigma of ‘age’ to become discreditable, that is, women can ‘pass’ for younger and thus shift from a low-status group to a higher-status group. This chapter focuses on the paths older women take that highlight the tensions between positive acceptance of growing older while subverting the stigmatising symbol ‘gray’, and the performance of beauty work in a society that confers advantages on those who successfully pass for younger.
