social experiments with coiffure

[the_siobhan]

My hair is now completely grey and I haven't coloured it at all since growing it back from last year's head-shaving. What's interesting about this is that a small sub-set of people have started offering me seats on public transit. It most frequently comes from people who are a lot younger than me, so I'm guessing grey hair reads as "generic old person" to them even if I don't look particularly elderly in any other respect. (Just for reference, I have slightly more wrinkles than Johnny Depp, but slightly fewer than Conan O'Brian who were both born the same year as me.)

My suspicion that it was about the hair was pretty much confirmed this week. Wearing a wig stopped the seat offers.

So it will be interesting to find out what happens once I have silver-grey hair in a mohawk.

Comments

[redbird]

Please do report on the responses to the silver-grey mohawk. I have been occasionally tempted to dye my hair because I get tired of the seat offers: or, rather, of people who don't seem to want to accept "no thank you" without an added reason: "thanks, but I've been sitting all day" or "thanks, but I'm getting off at the next stop" is less likely to get a repeated offer/instruction to take their seat than "no thanks, I'm fine."

(There's more gray in my hair than when this userpic was taken, but I haven't noticed more wrinkles.)