Does a gray head of hair make you look like a silver fox -- or like you don’t care about your appearance? The answer may depend on whether you’re a man or a woman, according to this TODAY show segment, featuring HuffPost blogger Vivian Diller, Ph.D., author of “Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change.”
In the piece, TODAY reporters asked a focus group to brainstorm famous men who pull off gray hair -- Anderson Cooper, Barack Obama and George Clooney, to name a few. But the same group struggled to list women who look good with gray hair -– after some hesitation, they listed Betty White, Paula Deen and Queen Elizabeth.
These results may come down to a double standard for gray: According to a poll on Today.com, 56 percent of respondents said that a man who gets his hair professionally colored is “a little vain -- a guy shouldn’t be spending as much time in a salon as a woman.”
And that's no gray area. “This double standard has been in existence for thousands and thousands of years,” Diller says on the show.
While Diller does believe that there’s a desire among women to go natural, there’s a corresponding pressure from the media to keep locks looking young -- even if that means the color comes out of a bottle. Watch the clip below, then let us know -- is your hair natural or colored?
Watch:
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