On Sep 2, 11:58 am, "Kent Finnell" bellsouth.net> wrote:

I am familiar with the term "suicide blonde" but I always thought it
had negative connotations beyond just "bleached blonde" - as in, "dyed
by her own hand and it's obvious" (iow, poorly done and/or over-
bleached).

That's why I made the reference to Courtney Love.

Before the age of five or so, I was a redhead. Since most pictures
were black and white at the time, it's difficult to tell my hair color
from old photos. All my baby pictures are b/w and only ca. 1956 or
1957 did color photos start appearing in which the red color clearly
shows. (School photos were all b/w.) By the time I thought one way or
another about the color of my hair, the red had faded and I considered
myself blonde although some people continued to refer to me as
strawberry blonde. By about age seven, color photos show no remaining
red. (Red hair has a nasty habit of "fading" over time - every
redhead I ever knew lost all or most of the red by middle-age.)

As to gray: Both my mother and father went gray late in life. I
remember my great grandfather, who had to have been in his late 70s or
more at the time, not being totally gray yet and my maternal
grandmother, his daughter, not being totally gray even though into her
60s. My youngest sister, age 43, has, at most, a few strands of
gray. (Which is somewhat of a miracle considering she has three
children under the age of eight.)

On the other hand, I have a friend who was graying in his mid-20s and
was totally gray by his mid-40s.

That said, I just turned 56 and don't mind admitting that the slightly
strawberry blonde shade of my hair is no longer completely natural.

-KD