Save the day by saving your gray!

Is your hair so dark like mine that within a week of a salon visit, your roots start showing their true colors? It's embarrassing. You want to bury your head and you feel the desperate need to cover your gray but there is no quick, temporary solution...or is there?

I'm going to share a trade beauty secret that I learned from my mother when I was a young girl.  It seemed like my mother had every trick imaginable up her sleeve and I, of course, was always in her shadow taking mental notes. Mom was a "primper."  If she wasn't polishing her toenails in the car as dad was still backing out of the driveway, she was in the mirror lining her lips, methodically penciling in her eyebrows or gluing on false lashes.  I remember those fussy days and quite frankly, I miss them.  

I can clearly remember mom running the soft mascara brush through her thick, coarse locks.  I still recall asking her what in God's name she was doing putting mascara in her hair.  Mom's reply was, "I'm touching up my grays!"  For some reason that stuck with me. To a child, it was weird.  Nonetheless, like my parents, I began graying at a young age.  At age 21, I began plucking each gray as it tried to make its debut into my 90s spiral perm, but I wouldn't have it.  It seemed as though the more I plucked, the faster they grew (you know, like shaving; they came in twofold).

Well, it wasn't until my 30s that I came out of hiding and embraced my mother's clever trick.  Clairol Loving Care (for those of you old enough to appreciate the commercial) promised, "I'm gonna wash that gray right out of my hair," was not going to supply me with the instant quick-fix that I needed.  I can honestly claim that I probably wore mascara twice in my life so reaching into a make-up bag for that fix was not an option.  I had somewhere important to go and little time to remedy the problem, so to CVS I ran.  I grabbed the cheapest and the darkest mascara I could find, ran home, glopped-up the brush and began to stroke the grays that lined the front of my forehead, just as mom once did.  Talk about a quick fix?  I now keep a fresh bottle handy for the next beauty 911.