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Instagram can be a stressful place. It’s full of perfect bodies, perfect faces, perfect vacations, perfect children, perfect lives. Of course, none of those people are really as flawless as they seem when you’re mindlessly scrolling through your feed. Still, it can take a psychological toll, at least on me.
Which is why Grombre is such a corrective. The account, now 29,000 followers strong, features women of all ages with various stages of gray and graying hair. “Grombre” is a play on “ombré,” a trend in hair color that was ubiquitous a few years ago. The look could be anything from a gradual color gradation to a more severe dip-dyed look with a demarcated line between the two colors. In this case, gray is one of the colors.
I have a head full of gray hiding and fighting to come out from under the 20-plus years and thousands of dollars’ worth of blonde hair dye I’ve been heaping on it. The idea of ever stopping is terrifying to me. But this feed full of beaming, confident women has started to make me see it differently. As I wrote in my piece on the rebranding of anti-aging skin care, the best way to normalize aging is to portray what it really looks like. And wow, does Grombre do that, in the best possible way.
The account features an ex-Olympian, women who have gone through addiction, new moms, and women who are annoyed that their husbands are going silver without even giving it a second thought. So many of them have even embraced their grays to the extent that their Instagram handles reflect it: young_and_gray, saltandpeperpixie, gray.and.beyond. It’s a place for celebration and for commiseration during the growing-out process, which can take years.
Grombre is the brainchild of Martha Truslow Smith, a 26-year-old graphic designer who found her first gray hair at 14. She decided to stop dyeing at 24 and started Grombre in July 2016. The page grew slowly until it received a mention in a Refinery29 story. Since then, its followers have shot up from 8,000 in July to 29,000 now.
Truslow Smith doesn’t want the account to be perceived as a judgment call against women who choose to still dye their hair, because she understands there are many reasons that they do it: security, confidence, self-care. “I am addressing the women who are really feeling ashamed and embarrassed, or might even have allergies to hair dye but are still doing it. I want to ask them why,” she says.
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Here, Truslow Smith talks about what the reaction has been like to her going gray in her 20s and the feedback she gets about the Grombre account.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Cheryl Wischhover
How did you come up with “Grombre”?
Martha Truslow Smith
If you ever see someone growing their hair out, especially in those first couple of months, it looks like a mistake. We’re not exactly used to seeing people with half-dyed brown hair and then tons of roots. It’s this question of, “Did she miss her hair appointment? What’s going on?” So that whole process is awkward, it’s long, it’s uncomfortable, it’s vulnerable, and there’s not really a word for it. If you are growing out your gray roots, essentially it’s gray at the roots and then your old dye color at the end.
Cheryl Wischhover
So tell me why you started Grombre.
Martha Truslow Smith
I’m 26 years old, which I’m sure comes as a surprise to most people. They probably think I’m a bit older, but that’s kind of the point for me. A couple of years ago, I was flipping through one of my mom’s fashion magazines. Every advertisement was like, “Oh, get rid of your wrinkles.” Basically, the language was, “You should be ashamed of being who you are.” And I was like, “Dang. I’m only 26 and I feel shameful of that. What is this going to look like when I’m older? And I’m only going to get older.”
What started off in high school as, “Oh, I want a purple streak in my hair. It’s self-expression and fun,” turned into college-age, “Oh, my goodness, my roots are showing. What am I going to do?” I just kind of ignored the deep anxiety around that three-week cycle until one day I stopped myself and asked a question I hadn’t yet thought to ask myself, which was, “Why do I feel this way? Why do I feel so shameful about this? Am I going to lock myself into believing that my value has peaked in my early 20s and then the rest of my life is me trying to maintain this facade that doesn’t describe who I am and the life that I’m living?”
Cheryl Wischhover
How old were you then?
Martha Truslow Smith
So that’s when I was 24. I stopped dyeing my hair. Terrifying process, especially in your 20s. I scoured the internet, and I was like, “Okay, there’s got to be some sort of resource out there.” But there were all of these hot 20-something Kardashian-looking girls dying their hair, what they called “granny hair.” And I was like, “Okay, that does not help at all.”
I said, “Well, you know what? I’m just going to start an Instagram account, just kind of as a passion project.” I was shocked when I had 20 followers after a couple of months. Oh, my gosh. There are 20 other women out there that feel the same way that I do? And it just kind of grew from there. It was very organic.
Cheryl Wischhover
How many submissions do you get?
Martha Truslow Smith
That is actually a tricky element that I’m trying to navigate. I can get anywhere from 25 to 150 in a day, which is a lot. It’s wonderful, because these women aren’t just passive followers. They are really into it, and that’s amazing. But I don’t want to be that account that posts so much that after a week of following, people are like, “Okay, this is too much.” You know, you get disengagement from that. Then, also, I have a day job, so I can’t sit on Instagram and post all day.
I really make an effort to show different stages of the growth, different walks of life, different stories. There was one recently where this woman wrote, “I lost my son and he doesn’t have the privilege of going gray in his life, so I’m going to do that for him.” And how beautiful is that? This is our life that we’re living, and we are completely saturated in this culture that is constantly telling us to mask that life up and be someone who we once were. But what’s wrong with the person we are now?
Cheryl Wischhover
What are some other really memorable stories that you’ve heard in the last two years?
Martha Truslow Smith
There have been a couple of cancer survivors or women who know of someone that suffered from cancer and then decided to shave their head and just not dye it again. That’s been remarkable. And women whose little girls are struggling with a health condition or their own self-image, and they’re worried that they’re going to look up to their mom and be like, “Well, she can’t even accept herself,” and then follow along a path that they themselves are not happy as grown women.
And along that line, some mothers of young boys, where boys are like, “Mom, you can’t not dye your hair. You’re going to look old.” So it’s a lesson to them to kind of say, “No, I’m your mother and I’m really valuable,” and be that example in their life. I think it’s wonderful.
Cheryl Wischhover
What stage of gray are you at now?
Martha Truslow Smith
If you saw me at a distance, you would probably think I just had really shiny brown hair, and you get closer and you realize I am sprinkled with white hairs. I’ve got these — honestly, I think they’re awesome — white streaks growing randomly on my head. May is when I chopped off all [the rest] of my dye. So my two-year growth just ended.
Cheryl Wischhover
In your real life, what kind of reactions do you get to your gray hair?
Martha Truslow Smith
I get stopped occasionally by women who say, “Oh, if my hair looked like yours, then I would do it.” And I’m like, “Honey, how do you know that your hair doesn’t look like mine? I know it’s a leap of faith, but you have to do that if that’s really what your heart is tugging at.”
I got married in March, and most of my friends live elsewhere. I haven’t been posting too many photos of my hair, and I hadn’t been open about the fact that I’ve been running this Instagram account. At my wedding, all of my close friends were really seeing me for the first time with gray hair. Obviously, there was a little bit of shock. They’re really proud of me and proud to see me love myself in a way that I hadn’t necessarily before. Because the process is really challenging. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Cheryl Wischhover
In what way?
Martha Truslow Smith
All the ways! It’s really hard. You’re going to have good days, and you’re going to have bad days, and then you’re going to have really bad days. But on those really bad days, it’s really important to remember that as bad as you feel, on the positive scale, you’re going to feel that good once you get to a point of letting your hair grow.
Each woman’s journey is their own. I’ll speak to my own: You feel self-conscious. You feel like there’s a spotlight on you, and you feel like you have to explain yourself until one day, you have a conversation with yourself and you’re like, “No. I don’t have to explain this to anyone.” This is something that a lot of people don’t understand, and even those who are really well-intentioned will say things that are accidentally hurtful. You can’t hold it against them because really, you are on the front lines right now of a big cultural shift.
Cheryl Wischhover
Can you give me an example of some of those hurtful things?
Martha Truslow Smith
I had someone tell me, “Oh, don’t worry. Your gray hair doesn’t bother me.” They were trying to comfort me and I’m like, “Oh, god. I can sleep at night. Thank god. Oh, phew, good to know.” Stuff like that. It stabs at you in little ways, especially if you’re already having a hard day.
So you have a choice to make: Am I going to let that opinion affect my choices, or am I going to wade through the waters and figure out who I am and keep going? I feel like women specifically, we’re not only bombarded with all of these things that we have to fix about ourselves, but we constantly just get fixated with our roles. “You’re a mom. You’re a wife. This is your job,” and that’s kind of it. But really, we’re these multidimensional, beautiful creatures living big lives that should be lived even bigger. So, yeah, I focus on gray hair, but it’s so much bigger than that.
Cheryl Wischhover
What do other women tell you?
Martha Truslow Smith
I get a lot of women who write in and say, “I really want to start letting my hair grow out, but my husband won’t let me.” Or, “My husband wants me to be blonde.” Or, “My husband’s scared of having a wife that looks ‘older than him.’” It just breaks my heart. And I’m like, “Girl, you’ve got to do it if that’s what you want to do.”
Cheryl Wischhover
Is there anything else you want to say about this little mini movement you have going?
Martha Truslow Smith
I just want to emphasize that it’s not dyed hair versus not-dyed hair. It’s really a journey of, “Are you unhappy? Is it because of your hair? Okay. Now address that.” That’s really the bottom-line question that I’m trying to get women to ask themselves.
And I’m so proud of all of these women that are in their own lives, kind of isolated. They might be the only women in their friend group, and that’s kind of where Grombre comes in. They don’t have the support in their daily lives or are getting negative feedback from people that they love: their mothers, their sisters. They come and find support from each other, and just these women reaching out constantly to each other and very genuinely, I think, is making us better people.
