Part of Karen Kenny’s beauty routine is a trip to the hair salon every two to three months.
“My hair grows very, very fast,” Kenny said. “So it’s like you’re always in the beauty salon.”
She usually goes in to color her gray hair -- color she wasn’t able to get after salons across the country closed due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“I’m really surprised that it came in as white as it did,” Kenny said.
Two months without coloring and Kenny, like many other women, is starting to embrace her gray hair.
“I just want to keep it,” she said. “I love it. No more dyeing.”
“They’re ready to go all the way to an ash gray or an ash blonde,” said Angela Cox, owner of Exclusive Hair Care Salon and Spa in Fort Lauderdale.
She says many of her clients who started going gray during quarantine are now choosing to stay that way.
“Due to the coronavirus they see that they were solely codependent on their stylist, so rather than go out there and be messing with chemicals at home alone and make their hair burn out or fall out or having a really bad color job, they’re like, ‘Let me just go all the way and embrace my natural self, my natural color,’” Cox said.
Along with natural color, Cox says some are also embracing their natural curls or going shorter.
“They just want to do less maintenance,” Cox said.
At Natural Shades of Beauty in Lauderhill, owner Deborah Bain Lewis is seeing the same thing.
“We do braids, locks, natural hair,” Bain Lewis said. “Some of the gray, it looks like highlights so it’s really beautiful.”
Her client Nadine Dillion says she started freaking out in March when the salon closed and her grays kept popping up.
“I was like embarrassed at one stage,” Dillion said.
Before the pandemic, she came in every two weeks for coloring. She says she even used a pencil to color in the grays while at home.
“After a while, I got frustrated,” Dillion said. “Like you know why spend money to do that? So what I do is just enjoy, embrace my grays.”
Spending less money is another reason some women are keeping their gray hair. For some, coloring alone can start at $60 or more per trip.
Cox says some women also see it as trendy.
“It’s actually stylish now to go all the way silver,” Cox said.
It’s a trend Kenny says she’s sticking to from now on.
“I’m happy with this,” Kenny said. “I don’t ever have to dye it again.”
