What Is It With Young Women and Grey Hair in Stock Photos?
Please stop usurping our silver locks. By Carol Lennox
I search for pictures of lovely older women with silver hair for a story I’m writing about, you guessed it, older women. Write what you know. Right?
How are women my actual age represented in stock photos on a platform that shall remain nameless because of licensing with another platform I would never intentionally offend? As overly wrinkled crones. Seriously. Go check it out. I’ll wait.
How are lovely women with grey hair represented on the same unnamed platform? As young women with grey or silver hair which I highly suspect comes from hours in the chair of a hair colorist professional. What the AF?
There is some compromise in one or two models. One looks to be in her forties and one looks to be in her fifties. And that’s it. The rest are in their thirties or younger. If I want to write about lovely older women, and I do, I must use photos of the same two women for every article. A faux pas that earns scorn on the platform for which we write, for good reason.
My mother went from dark hair to platinum blonde, bypassing grey entirely. We’ll never know if she would have had bright silver locks or the steel grey my grandmother had. My great-grandmother’s hair, which reached to below her waist, was white with yellow tinges. My paternal grandmother had the silver we all hope for. The one these models are attempting to emulate.
Full disclosure: I don’t have grey hair. Not any you can see anyway. At the same age my grandmother and great-grandmother were fully grey, I have about a fourth of an inch at my forehead and at the temples.
Fortunately, it blends well with certain shades of blonde mixed with care by a hairdresser’s hands. It also makes cool highlights in my muckledy-duck real hair color. It’s actually pretty close to the highlights I had added in my thirties. Plus, I have a master colorist who blends it all beautifully, which means I can grow it out if I want, if it ever grows in more.
It’s totally cool that women who are going grey today have so many choices, and many are embracing the grey. Younger women dying theirs grey actually adds to the acceptance, so I’m not mad at them. Most likely the pendulum will swing back when they age, and they’ll cover the grey as my mother’s generation did.
In the meantime, is it too much to ask for a few stock photos of actual older women with actual grey hair? Just asking.