I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I will tell you about my choices.
I don’t get Botox or fake nails/lashes, or wear padded bras or spanx/girdles (even when I don’t like the size/shape I am) or dye my hair. It is rare for me to shave anything but my armpits. I had perms in my teens, but not since then, and I don’t own any curling irons, blow dryers, hot rollers, or the like. My sisters do all those things, but I yam what I yam, and “natural” has always been important to me. This stubborn insistence that I don’t need to change things is probably very vain. The one exception is that I do wear some makeup; the allergic circles under my eyes are so dark that people have asked me how I was injured, or even assumed abuse. So I wear concealer and then light makeup, because the concealer makes everything look oddly flat.
As far as wanting to look younger, I am unconvinced that cosmetic measures change perceptions of age. It seems to me that a woman of a certain age with colored hair (or Botox or filler lashes, etc) is still identifiably that age, with colored hair (or Botox or filler lashes, etc), possibly inviting more scrutiny of what age she really is.
I was proud of my streak of grey in my 20s, because it was like my dad’s. I can’t say when the spread began, but I never made a decision to “go grey”; it just slowly happened. My son identifies my hair color as grey overall, which I think is inaccurate, because the bottom-most layers of it are still quite brown. But when my friend complimented my hair recently and I called it golden (thinking of this pic), he said “well, we can settle on silver”. I guess he sees it as grey too. Shrug. He doesn’t have any hair, so he can talk.
If my grey hair has any effect on how people perceive me, my guess is that it contrasts with my energy, so the end result is more emphasis on the vitality.
I know not everyone here agrees with me. One fabber has suggested dying my hair would make me look younger; a former fabber remarked that I should at least cut it into a recognizable style. I prefer to DMOT.
Good luck making a decision you’re happy with!
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