By Dr. Dhivya Srinivasa
There was a time when spotting a gray hair felt like a personal attack.
I would stand under the unforgiving lighting of my bathroom mirror, tilting my head like I was conducting a scalp investigation for the FBI. I had tweezers involved at one point, which, for the record, I do not recommend as a long-term strategy unless your goal is emotional instability.
For years, I colored my hair without even thinking twice about it. It just felt like part of being a woman, especially working in aesthetics and wellness, you have to maintain it and quickly cover it to stay ahead of it. Gray hair was always framed as something to fix before anyone noticed. The funny thing is, I never judged other women for going gray. In fact, I usually thought they looked beautiful, like they had really settled into themselves.
At some point I realized I was holding myself to a completely different standard than everyone else, and I think a lot of women do that. We grow up hearing so many messages about aging that we barely even notice them anymore. You’re supposed to look “natural,” but not too natural, youthful, but still act your age. We praise men for aging and call them distinguished, while women are expected to somehow look frozen in time forever.
I still love beauty, skincare, treatments, wellness, and all the little rituals that make people feel good about themselves. I created Avara because I genuinely believe there is power in taking care of yourself and feeling confident in your own skin. And to be clear, this is not me saying women should stop coloring their hair or pretending I suddenly no longer care about beauty. If coloring your hair makes you feel like your best self, I fully support that. For me, this was never about judging other women’s choices. It was about changing the way I personally viewed aging and learning to approach it with a little less fear.
As a surgeon, I also think I see aging differently now than I did when I was younger. Working with breast cancer patients changes your perspective on a lot of things. I have seen women lose their hair, their breasts, and sometimes even the opportunity to grow older at all. You realize very quickly that our bodies are not ornaments meant to stay frozen in time, they carry us through difficult seasons, and they reflect everything we have lived through along the way.
So when the gray hairs started coming in, they stopped feeling like something I needed to hide immediately. In a strange way, growing them out started to feel almost defiant, not just against impossible beauty standards placed on women, but also as a quiet reminder to myself that it is a privilege to have hair at all, let alone hair that has had the chance to turn gray.
Now when I catch a glimpse of those silver strands in the mirror, I don’t see something fading, I see a life that has been lived. I see years of growth, resilience, heartbreak, healing, and wisdom that I earned. After spending so much time around women who would have given anything for more time, more years, more moments in their bodies exactly as they were, it becomes very hard to look at aging as something ugly.