Coauthored by Heather Widdows and Jessica Sutherland, University of Warwick
The hair colour dominating 2026 is not blond, or brunette, or even "ginger spice" or "cherry cola," but grey, or if you prefer, silver. Last week, Good Housekeeping declared that “grey hair is the biggest beauty statement of the year.” It shows pictures of 10 celebrities who have embraced the grey: Glenn Close, Salma Hayek, Pru Leith, Andie MacDowell, Melinda Messenger, Helen Mirren, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sharon Stone, and Kristen Scott Thomas. The enthusiasm over Oliva Coleman’s transformation from her trademark short dark curls to long and flowing grey curls is gushing all over media and social media.
Grey can be a few strands as highlights, blended and woven with blonde or brown, creating a "natural ombre" or a luminous single colour. But in whatever form, grey is the hair colour of the moment.
Women & Home says "going grey is the most stylish thing you can do in 2026," also listing celebrities who have grey hair. Helen Mirren and Andie MacDowell feature on this list, too, along with others. Harper's Bazaar has an article this month on "9 ways to style long grey hair for autumn," with pictures of… have a guess? Yes, it's Andie and Helen again, and Sarah Jessica Parker in this one, too. Elle also has an article this month on the trend for going grey. This one is a "how-to" piece: "Arctic Blonde Is the ‘Grey Blending’ Colour Technique for Embracing Silver." No Andie or Helen here, presumably because they have already gone full grey and are not transitioning. Instead, the article is accompanied by pictures of Jerry Hall’s long locks, fresh from Celebrity Traitors.
Going Grey Does Not Challenge the Beauty Ideal
What should we take from this? Fabulous; we can now have grey hair. Hurrah. We can save time and money. At between £50 and £100 every six weeks for hair dye, this soon piles up. We are totally in with this trend. Full disclosure, one of us has gone from blond to grey over the last year or two (no prizes for guessing which of us!). It is great that grey hair is no longer taboo, and long grey hair, too. Even curls are being embraced—something close to our hearts as curly girls. So grey—hurrah!—but it is only hair. And changing hair colour does not challenge the beauty ideal.
The global beauty ideal focuses on the body and the face, not hair colour. Back in 2018, when Perfect Me was published, it was already the case that diversity in hair colour, eye colour, or skin colour did nothing to challenge the beauty ideal. The features of the global beauty ideal are thinness, firmness, smoothness, and youth. Since the pandemic, firmness and smoothness of the face and body have become even more demanding, as hard to believe as that is. When it comes to the beauty ideal, all types of hair colour are acceptable; they were in 2018, and they are now. In 2016, Vogue ran an article on grey hair being sexy, and in 2018, another on an editor embracing "the rebelliousness of silver hair." If more women feel less pressure to spend time and money on their hair that they don’t want to, that is fabulous. If they do want to keep their hair blonde, red, blue, or any other colour, they should of course keep dyeing it. We should not focus on practices, on what women do or don’t do to their bodies. Instead, we need to focus on the increasingly dominant global ideal, which requires more and more of us to take knives and needles to our faces and bodies, just to be normal.
Why Grey Hair on Otherwise Conforming Bodies Reinforces the Beauty Ideal
Hang on, you might say; isn’t this too quick? Grey hair is different from other hair colours. Grey hair is old hair. To go grey is to actively embrace being old, and therefore is, after all, challenging the ideal. But is it? As we’ve shown time and time again, challenging one feature of the beauty ideal does not challenge the ideal but reinforces it. This is true of body-positive campaigns, which challenge thinness, but otherwise promote firm, smooth, and glamourous bodies (often in pinup poses), or campaigns to grow body hair on thin, firm, and young bodies. The grey hair we are being sold is on otherwise conforming and beautiful people. If the grey we are permitted is the grey of Andie MacDowell and Helen Mirren, thin, glamourous, and beautifully made up, then the ideal remains dominant.