 Hi guys, welcome to Hilary at home and today's video we're going to be talking about transitioning to gray hair because I am so happy and so grateful that it's been one week since I trimmed off the very last vestiges, the last remnants of me dying my hair and fighting what nature gave me and fighting the genetic predisposition to premature graying that I inherited from my father whom I adored. So let me tell you a story about transitioning to gray hair and why I am so happy to finally be in this place where I have got my silvers, my grays, my whites, whatever you want to call them, they're here now, they are welcome, I am happy to have them and I feel awesome for having them. So the first time that I noticed that I had gray silvers was probably when I was about seven or eight years old and I had a few of them sort of like in here so you couldn't see them along the hairline, but if you went in you could see like there was a little patch here. And I remember thinking, oh wow, it's not normal for a seven or eight year old to have white hair, does this mean I've got superpowers because I used to love comic books and all of that sort of stuff, but no I didn't have any superpowers. And for the longest time I thought it was really cool that I had those silvers until the stuff had become invisible to other kids at school and of course what are kids going to do when they see something a little bit different, they make fun of it. And so I got made fun of it a lot enough for it to become something that I didn't like. And I remember wanting to dye my hair because as the years went by it just started increasing you know just spreading out, but my mom wouldn't let me dye my hair and rightly so because I was too young she basically wasn't very much into chemicals and stuff like that and rightly so. But once I started working and earning my own money I was like I'm making my own money, it's my money I can dye my hair and I started dyeing my hair. In a huge chunk of my 20s I spent dyeing my hair trying so hard to hide the grays trying to figure out what's my natural hair color. Should I go dark black because it would look really weird because my natural hair color is more kind of like a really deep brown rather than a black, but yeah. And to add to this was the fact that I basically couldn't really afford to go to a salon to get my hair colored so I was doing the diet yourself using the home kits and which can be quite fine if you know what you're doing but in my 20s I just didn't know what I was doing but I was doing it anyway. And it reached ahead when I tried to do some super fancy stuff to try and make my hair look exactly like Jennifer Lopez's hair which was so crazy. At the time I didn't realize that they had hair extensions and photoshopping and stuff like that and I actually believed the ads that you would see telling you that if you use this hair you can make it look like this. So the dye. And my hair fell out after I put on too much hair dyeing and I was like okay fine I have to start over I have to grow my hair and I started growing my hair again but then I would dye it but I was a bit more mindful and I was looking for milder dyes for the natural ones. And I had varying degrees of a success and then I did get to a point in my 30s where I completely shaved my head. I think I remember getting obsessed with this idea that I wanted to see what I looked like completely bald because I'd never been like you know proper skin. And I shaved all of my hair off and it was so liberating. It was just really really nice but also very cold. It was really cold until you felt the wind caressing your scalp. You've never felt cold my friend. But then I started you know then I really quite got enamored with the short cropped like super super short hair. Look but the problem with that is maintaining it you kind of have to shave it literally almost every two to three days. Because when you cut your hair that close that's when you realize how quickly it grows. So it was growing so fast and I was like oh I don't want this. This is too much for me having to keep on shaving it. So then I started letting it grow a bit. So I was like okay I'll let it grow a bit and I can have like a box cut or something like that short back inside. But the problem was that when my hair was that short it really emphasized how much more silver I had in my hair. I didn't want that I was freaking out. I was like no no no I don't want and I was like hang on my hair is short I can stop dying it right. And I was like I'm gonna turn my hair is all gonna turn silver within a few years anyway. Why not just you know accelerate myself there by dying my hair platinum blonde. Which oh my gosh the things that I did to my hair. Yeah so I was putting a hydrogen peroxide cream to strip my hair of its color and then bleaching it. And I got to a point where the only way that I could get it to be platinum white. Was if I did the bleaching process twice one after the other. So I would do it on say Tuesday and then the next and then on Wednesday the next day I would then do it. And that's what would get it nice and white like proper shiny white. And it was nice and it would be nice for just about a week before my dark roots would start showing and then I'd have to do the process again. And at the time I was kind of like oh I don't care my hair is super short anyway I'm not growing it so it's gonna be fine. But you have a scalp your hair comes from the scalp you know and messing up my scalp as well. So yeah so I did quite some damage but I got to a point where I was like after 10 days it would need to be done up in order to maintain the you know the pristine white thing. So I was just like oh you know what I can't keep doing this to my scalp because by that point my hairline once we get like the hair follicles were beginning to be reduced in number. And I have a pretty healthy hairline it's now sort of like repairing itself but this used to be super super bushy. But yeah so I was like okay we can't keep going on like this this is unsustainable. And I was like how about this sounds crazy but how about you just accept that you have gray hair. And I was like okay let's give that a go right because it seemed just the easier thing to do so that I didn't have to do the shaving you know the cutting of my hair and all that. And so you know I just cut off all of the platinum blonde hair which was really dry and unpleasant and really like candy falls because all of that bleaching just wasn't good for it. So I wasn't too sad to see it go and then my hair started growing again and again I freaked out at how many silvers I had. I would be fine until somebody would mention a negative comment where they'd be like oh I didn't realize that you were that old. And I'd be like I'm only 30 39 you know. And then I kind of like speak out and so I was like okay now I'm going to dye my hair again but this time I'm going to dye red. Red seems to be like something you know that when it starts growing the roots wouldn't show up as much. And so I dyed my hair red which was all lovely and really nice until I went swimming and chlorine and hair did not go hand in hand because I was training for a triathlon then. And I hadn't brought my cap for the swimming session. And yeah just completely ruined the dye job which was very very frustrating because then I was walking around with this kind of like ginger whatever brass yellowy toned hair. And so I was like yeah you're done you're done baby girl you need to stop dyeing your hair. So that's how I ended up stopping with it and that was probably about a year ago. I'll have to check if it's not a year it's about just a little bit over a year. And then I was like it's just going to grow out but I didn't want to cut my hair again so I just let it grow out. And so over the past year I have had hair that had the ends that had been dyed. And as of last week on Sunday I did the final trim that removed all of them. And now this is my hair silvered in its crowning glory. So one of the things that I worried a lot about going gray about letting my hair go gray was that I was worried that you know the silver gray color is a cool tone and I tend to favor warm colors warm tones. And so I was just a little bit worried about that but guess what there was nothing to worry about because I haven't had to change much with regards to my makeup. But in fact I feel like my pink lipsticks are more popping because they've got this as well to frame them. And yeah I've just been loving it and you know I can still be vibrant. I can still be vital and I can still look attractive with my hair like this. Yes I still do get a few negative comments here and there which I now just take as you know I realize that I don't have to take that on board just because they perceive that women of a certain age aren't supposed to allow their gray hair to show. That's not on me that's on them so I just you know I just accepted so when some people's you know I'm like wait how old are you sometimes I'll did panic and just become 63 or I'm 73 you know. Or sometimes if it's been asked in a considerate way in a polite way I'll explain that I have premature gray hair that I inherited from my father and I'm happy with my hair. It is right now super healthy. It's bouncy. It's light. It's got movement and I enjoy it very much. And so yeah that is my gray hair transitioning story. I'm 41 years old. Well I'm gonna turn 41 soon and in another few years I'm probably gonna have a full head of these lovely silvers. Thank you so much for watching. Yeah I will see you in the next video guys until then take care. Bye.