SILVER LININGS

I Never Got Complimented on My Hair Until It Turned Gray

Liz Kamarul vividly remembers the day she noticed her first gray hair. More accurately, a friend noticed it first.

“I was 17 years old, and I was sitting in a parking lot in my mom’s car with a couple of my friends,” she recalled to The Looker.

“I was in the front seat, and my friend behind me spotted my first gray hair, and she just made so much fun of me.
It was mortifying.”

Kamarul, now 42, remembers the moment as deeply “embarrassing,” noting that it sparked a preoccupation-turned-obsession over her gray hairs.

“In college, more of them started picking up on the back of my head. I remember sitting on my counter in my dorm room bathroom with a mirror and just meticulously combing through my hair section by section and pulling out every individual gray hair that I had,” Kamarul said.

She added, “I would just constantly, obsessively keep up on it.”

At the time, there were fewer than 20 gray hairs. Still, her trichotillomania—a mental health condition that causes a person to compulsively pull out their hair—did not make the experience easier.

In her late twenties, Kamarul could no longer keep up with pulling out the new gray hairs. That’s when she started dyeing her hair excessively.

“By the time I was 32, it was getting to the point where I had a really white stripe down my part, and it just was impossible to keep up with it anymore,” Kamarul recalled. “That’s when I finally bleached all of my hair blonde.”

The bright-blond shade was something Kamarul had wanted to try out for a while, but it was also a great transition to letting her gray hair grow.

That platinum transformation was the last time she ever fully dyed her hair.

“At that point, I started to feel pretty excited about growing out my gray hair,” Kamarul, who now works as a muralist and splits her time between Idaho and Louisiana, said.

She hadn’t realized that almost half of her hair was growing out in shades of gray.

“It was really pretty and bright and kind of glittery,” she recalled.

She also got a shoulder-length cut to remove the dry, damaged ends from all the chemical processing.

Over the next few years, her hair slowly transitioned into a full silver shade.

To her surprise, something that once embarrassed her now dramatically boosted her confidence.

“I don’t think I ever received a compliment on my hair my entire life, and I always really hated it and was kind of never happy with it. And since going gray, I receive compliments on it almost every single time we go out in public,” Kamarul said.

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SILVER BULLET

I Grew Out My Gray Hair at 32, and the Reaction Shocked Me

Roosa Rahkonen

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Now, she can’t believe she ever wanted to cover it up.

Her hair has not only inspired many women who follow her online to embrace their natural hues, but it also inspired her mother.

“My mom had been dyeing her hair my entire life, and I let my hair grow gray before hers. That inspired her to stop dying her hair, and it turns out she has the most beautiful, pure white hair, and again, same as me, she receives compliments on it all the time,” she said.

Kamarul continued, “A lot of people who are a little bit older than me say, ‘Oh, you can do it because you’re so young,’ but my mom is 74, and it looks incredible on her too.”

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Gray Will Hunting

‘Good Will Hunting’ Star Embraces His Silver Fox Era

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Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

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