{Silver} Fox on the run...

Update - As I was writing this post, I was simultaneously continuing my internet quest for silver fox advice, and looky looky what I found:

 How Bourgeois - "Going grey? Hooray!"

I love this chick; she is so cool and her hair is just gorgeous, exactly what I am aiming to achieve.
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Thursday:

Lately, I have been scouring beauty magazines, pinterest boards and celebrity websites, searching for a solution to an age old problem hardly unique to little ole moi.  Just this morning I spent over an hour looking through a tangled internet nest for my particular silver egg.  That bird just wouldn't sit, it seems.  I still have no idea, short of Jamie Lee Curtis-ing my long red hair, how to gracefully transition into the inevitable.  I have grey hair and plenty of it, so I want to "go grey" and escape the hair color whirlpool in which I am starting to drown.  Am I ready for this?  No clue, just yet.

Okay - time for you all to just curb the eye-rolling and "oh please" groaning.  This is a very big deal!  I am the mother of a preschooler and I have twice already been called her "grandma".  S..M..H!!  How much worse will this get when I silver fox the locks?  I live in a rural town of about 5,000 where, I kid you not, the average age of a middle school mom hovers somewhere around 30.  When Charlie starts the 6th grade, I will be 52. There goes that bell curve.  Yikes.  Perhaps hardest of all for me to swallow, I got my first grey hair in the fall of my freshman year in college, when I was barely 18.  The same month the Berlin Wall came down.  That was 25 years ago.   I still remember the very moment.  Not when the wall came down, oh no...when I saw that grey hair in my right temple.  My priorities were then and perhaps still are pretty well (un)balanced, don't you think (insert my hardly contained smirks and snickers now)?

Please, dear readers (including two of my own former hairstylists and some great friends who are color professionals), allow me this one guilty obsession.  The truth is, I am neither afraid of the aging process nor interested in unsuccessfully struggling to maintain a look that no longer works for me.  It is just that I really, really like my hair color.  It has hovered somewhere between a shade of auburn that appears sun kissed in the summer and a lush mahogany/brunette in the winter, for the better part of the last 17 years.  When people would ask me if the color was natural, I would always answer, "yes it is, but with a little enhancement!"  I would usually either lighten it a little or add dimensional high and low lights.  They always pulled a little red, so even when I went darker I had very pretty auburn glints within the layers.  However, this last year has been a hair color disaster.  I am now grey enough that my hair feels much more coarse and wiry.   I have tried blonding it up, going (way too) red, adding more low lights and one overall color effect that I termed "the zebra".  Not attractive, no, not in the least.  All the while, the greys just keep on appearing, marching in a tiny but clearly visible line from my forehead to my crown like albino ants heading off into follicle oblivion.  My temples are almost solid white, now, and any colorist worth their salt will warn of the risks of those hairs over processing, causing one to look a little too much like a certain fast food clown.  Been there, suffered that.  To make matters worse, we are on a well that has some nasty mineral deposits that can cause my hair to look and feel like sunburnt straw.  At this very moment, I have tricolor hair, and not in the beautiful multi-dimensional-looks-like-she-was-born-that-way hair. Nope, my current color looks more like candy corn, with a top inch of blonde that didn't fully process over the grey, followed by red that was so intense I had to strip it out and it is still noticeable, followed finally by a horizontal line of highlights and lowlights that would probably look fine on me, for about the first week following a professional service.  Then the troop of albino ants again repeat their march.  On Monday, I have my first appointment with another new stylist (the fifth in two years) and I feel as if I am going to an oncologist, only to get the "bad news" I already know - this particular case of greycell follinoma is incurable and the prognosis for remission is not at all looking good.

My Goal: 

From this.....

                            
Desperate for help, I have started googling "grey hair at 40," "going from red hair to grey," "going grey gracefully," and a plethora of other particular phrases that all essentially mean "I give, hair."  I found one very interesting blog in the process -

I am ready to give in to the beauty of age.  Even if this grey is premature for a 42 year old.  Even if I have a two year old who I do not want mistaken for my grandchild.  Even if I am living the life of most women half my age (especially for that reason, because I am not half my age and I am proud of that fact).  I am a wonderful mother and wife, and that is in large part due to my life experiences.  I am calmer, wiser.  I am more capable & confident to "be the change" I want, as well as to stand up & embrace within me the kind of woman I desire my own daughter to be one day.  I celebrate my next life journey! If that is really true, really true, then it shouldn't affect me to consider going short and letting the grey come in completely

...to this

natural, right?  But you know what?  I just don't agree with that notion.  Not yet, anyhow.  I have gotten my feet wet, even stepped into the pool up to my knees.  But I don't know if I am fully prepared to take the plunge. Maybe I will be, come Monday...