A few months ago, I was having my semiannual haircut, and I had the strangest revelation. [Cut to Willy Wonka having his hair cut by an Oompa-Loompa. He looks in a mirror, sees a strand of gray hair on his shoulder, and picks it up] In that one silver hair, I saw reflected my life's work, my factory, my beloved Oompa-Loompas. Who would watch over them when I was gone? I realized in that moment, "I must find an heir."
— Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005 version)
A character angsting about how they're getting old is a great source of drama. But how do we kick off this drama? What are some cultural signs of getting old? A milestone birthday? Nope. How would we iron out the birthday business to get to the development of the character's angst? Besides, we might ruin the appeal of the character's Vague Age. Bodily malfunctions like creaky joints? That might imply too old an age. Gray hair? People of all ages get those. But it's mainly associated with middle age. And it doesn't have any lasting impact, as long as they're removed or dyed over. And if it's only one strand, it's not immediately visible to the naked eye. Besides, it's just hair color and doesn't really impact anything else, other than the angst and freaking out about getting old that it is often the source of. Hence we have the First Gray Hair, which automatically equals age. A character is looking in the mirror (or at their hair itself, if it's long enough for that) and suddenly sees a glint of something different from their usual hair color. (S)He gives in to curiosity and inspects more closely to find that it's...GRAY HAIR! And on their own head, too! And thus the angsting about getting old begins.
Some may wonder whether it is worth it to have a character making a big deal over finding that one or more strands of his hair have changed color (even if it is to gray or white). Then again, Tropes Are Tools, and the First Gray Hair is often used for An Aesop about how growing older is a natural process and not necessarily a bad thing once the character has overcome his angst on his own or by force. It's also a harbinger: while the First Gray Hair is harmless by itself, there are more to come, one by one, until it's all gray, or even gone; also, it's tangible proof that they're leaving youth behind. Unfortunately, though, this way of dealing with having found the First Gray Hair seems to be limited to men who find them. Women who have found this tend to have more prolonged angst and are additionally shown removing or dyeing over their grays, and yes, the topic almost invites jokes about the first grey pubic hair, basically one way this trope can be Played for Laughs.
Compare Ma'am Shock, Milestone Birthday Angst. May lead to Mid-Life Crisis Car if Played for Laughs, or to Feeling Their Age. For certain men, however, it may just be the first step on the road to attractiveness. A woman, particularly in older works, may become an Elderly Blue-Haired Lady.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Old Clairol ad: "Does she or doesn't she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure!" The implication is that if she is (using a Clairol product), it's to cover up the grey and, of course, that it's just the right product to start using once a woman has had this happen to her.
- Grecian Formula had commercials for men's version and women's version to help them cover up that grey. Their ads usually started with a man looking in a mirror and visibly unhappy about having this, and the woman being mistaken for her husband's mother rather than his wife. They're happier once they use the product and their grays have vanished.
Anime & Manga
- In one episode of Crayon Shin-chan, Misae panics after Shinnosuke finds a single grey hair on her head, and attempts to paint it with a marker.
- Mis Mishtal from the anime El-Hazard: The Magnificent World went into hysterics after finding a single gray hair.
Comedy
- Whoopi Goldberg had an entire monologue built around realizing she's getting old. Part of it mentioned grey hairs showing up in her pubic region.
- Billy Connolly also said while grey hair on his head was bad, one of the worst shocks of aging was finding his first grey pubic hair. "In a certain light, my willy looks rather distinguished."
- Stewart Francis talks about finding his first grey pubic hair. He was calm about it and didn't freak out... unlike everyone else who was in the elevator with him.
Comic Books
- One Monica's Gang story involved Jimmy Five's father thinking of himself as old and weak after one of his five hairs apparently goes gray. It was actually covered in flour; the story was about his birthday.
Comic Strips
- Blondie (1930): Dagwood discovers his first grey hair and carries on about it while his wife Blondie tells him to Quit Your Whining. He finally calms down, then notices that Blondie has a grey hair too. She faints.
- Garfield had one strip where Garfield panics in front of the mirror as he notices a wrinkle, a gray hair, and then a wrinkled gray hair.
Film — Live-Action
- At the start of Vanilla Sky, David finds a grey hair and promptly yanks it out. It seems like an innocuous detail, but actually ties into the film's underlying theme.
- As quoted above, Willy Wonka tells Charlie that this happening to him is the reason why he started the Golden Ticket contest to find an heir in the 2005 film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
- Disney's Sing Along Songs had one song about the stages of life, one of which involved the man finding his first gray hair and snipping it off with a sour look.
- Poltergeist has the mom acquire a skunk stripe as a result of the stressful haunting she has undergone. She considers dyeing it, but doesn't.
- Movie!Rogue from X-Men gets her Skunk Stripe not from age, but as a result of being used to power Magneto's machine. She is asked whether she's considered dyeing it, but replies that she actually thinks it looks kind of cool, and wears it like a battle scar.
- The movie The Age of Adaline focuses on a woman immune from the ravages of time, so of course aging is a theme. The final shot is Adeline finding her first gray hair, one year after her aging restarted. Unlike most other reactions, hers is positive.
Literature
- Clarissa Stump has a moment like this in Murder on the Leviathan, and it is implied to not be the first time. She rips it out but is immediately ashamed of herself being in denial about her age.
- This is what kicks off the plot in Which Witch? by Eva Ibbotson. Arriman the Awful has been waiting around for his prophesied successor to show up; now that this one gray hair has shown up, he can't wait anymore, and his manservant suggests that the prophecy means his son. Of course, he isn't married, so this requires him to find a wife...
- Played with in The Catcher in the Rye. Sixteen-year-old Holden acknowledges having a great deal of grey hair, but does not seem concerned by it, except as a means to disguise his age in order to buy alcohol. Nevertheless, it is listed as being one of his 'adult-qualities', which is significant considering the themes of the novel...
- Amelia Peabody started discovering her first gray hair, over and over, round about World War One. Every time she spots one, she dyes it from a little bottle that she keeps dead secret (or did until her brother-in-law needed to make an emergency disguise).
- A lone gray hair on Alobar's head kicked off the plot of Tom Robbins's Jitterbug Perfume, due to his village's rules that they must have a young and strong king.
- In his book Time Flies, Bill Cosby said that he did not mind the hair on his head turning gray, because he thought it made him look more dignified. His first gray pubic hair, on the other hand...
- While working a spell that requires three hairs in White as Snow, Arpazia vaguely notices one of them is gray. Subverted in that Arpazia doesn't really have any sense of how old she is anymore, and is so disconnected from reality that she believes she's still a young girl.
- The Wheel of Time: Inverted with Nynaeve, who's exceptionally young to be a village wise woman and member of the Aes Sedai Magical Society, and has to work twice as hard to be taken seriously as a result. When she realizes that she won't have the gravitas of grey hair for at least another century or two, she's quite distraught.
- A Song of Ice and Fire. Cersei taunts her twin brother Jaime with the fact that he's getting some grey hairs in his famous golden hair, while willfully ignoring the signs that her own famed beauty is fading as well.
- Unseen Academicals: Stibbons (who's been basically running the University himself for years now because everyone keeps palming their work onto him) takes being called "young Stibbons" by one of the senior wizards particularly badly because he found a grey hair in his hairbrush that morning.
- In Sirena, the titular mermaid has been taught how humans' hair changes color as they approach death. When her human husband Philoctetes grows his first gray hair, Sirena swims to Mother Dora's grotto and begs her to help Philoctetes become immortal. Mother Dora refuses because Hera hates Philoctetes and no god would risk offending her by helping him.
Live-Action TV
- Ana (2020): Ana goes to a spa so she can get "*wink* a hair cut" (code phrase for laser treatment for bikini hair removal). After the treatments, she has three gray hairs left behind because they are too light for the laser to pick up. She leaves the spa in a huff without bothering to put her trousers back on and goes to the spa next door to beg for a wax job. Freaking-out ensues when she is told "they don't do that here".
- In an episode of Blackish, Bow freaks out about a single white female moving in downstairs.
- Buddy of Charles in Charge reacts disastrously to spotting a single grey hair.
- One episode of Clarissa Explains It All sees Clarissa's mother panicking about getting older after discovering that she has a gray hair. Clarissa's dad, however, is quick to point out to her that she only had a gray hair, having just plucked it out before both characters entered the scene.
- Played with in Dexter:
Vince Masuka: What are you working on?
Dexter: I, uh, found a gray hair. I was curious.
Vince Masuka: Oh, dude, I've totally done that.
Dexter: You're bald.
Vince Masuka: [points below belt]
Dexter: Oh. - Doctor Who: Captain Jack Harkness is immortal and apparently unaging, but in "Last of the Time Lords" he mentions having found a grey hair, and theorizes that he is aging very, very slowly.
- John Crichton discovers one in the Farscape episode "A Human Reaction". The episode moves on before he can really dwell on it but it's clear the prospect of growing old in space is unsettling to him.
- Forever Knight. Natalie finds her first grey hair in an episode where the case of the week involved women taking vampire blood to keep themselves younger.
- In the final episode of Lost, Richard finds one. Though rather than being a source of angst, he considers this a very good thing since it means he's no longer immortal.
- Dr Cox of Scrubs goes a little nuts when he finds a gray hair in his happy trail.
- Likewise Samantha in Sex and the City, leading to a horribly botched dye job when she tries using some drugstore hair color. At the end of the episode, she solves the problem by shaving it all off.
- Spoofed in Smallville. The Wicked Witch, Isobel, has taken over Lana's body and needs the hair of a virgin for a potion she's brewing. When Lois Lane has her back turned, Isobel plucks one of Lois's hairs out, but frowns upon realizing that Lois isn't a virgin. Lois, who is unaware that Lana is being possessed by Isobel, angrily asks Isobel why she would pluck one of her hairs out. Isobel lies and says "It was gray," to which Lois insists "I don't have any gray hair." Isobel shrugs and looks innocent. Lois gets a nervous expression on her face and says "I'll...be in the bathroom using your mirror," and hurries off.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation In "New Ground" Helena Rozhenko notes the appearance of a few grey hairs in her adoptive son Worf's beard. She tells him not to worry, saying all Rozhenko men have beards of iron gray.
- Super Adventure Team: When Buck notices his first grey hair, he freaks out about how old he is. When Talia says he's overreacting, he claims to be losing his hearing.
- Will & Grace: A few days before his birthday Will tells Grace he's found a gray chest hair, which is worrying as he doesn't have that many of them to begin with. He later admits that he plucked it out of self-consciousness. Grace offers some perspective when he lets her see the hair.
Grace: Could be worse.
Will: How? How could it be worse? (Grace looks down towards his crotch) Oh! Come on, Grace!
Video Games
- In Moshi Monsters, during the mission "Pop Goes the Boo Boo", you have to go in to see Baby Rox, but Simon Growl won't let you, and you try to trick him into leaving. One of the excuses is "you've got some grey hairs showing".
Webcomics
- Questionable Content: Twentysomething Marten insists
that he's not starting to go grey, he just has the occasional hair that doesn't have any pigment in it.
Dora: That's... exactly what a grey hair is. ...Oh my god, are you bothered by it? - In one Ozy and Millie strip, Millie claims she's just noticed Ozy has a gray hair. Ozy, a gray fox, just asks how long she's been waiting to use that one.
Web Original
- Mostly averted on Going Gray Looking Great, though some members on the site share stories about experiences fitting this trope.
- Thoroughly averted on the Salt & Pepper Thread on the Long Hair Community forum in that those who regularly post in that thread don't mind and even celebrate what they feel is the beauty of their gray hair. Played straight in the accounts members share about feeling old upon finding their first gray hair(s), but subverted in that posts about finding gray in one's hair is considered a cause for celebration.
Western Animation
- One episode of Totally Spies! had Sam finding a gray hair on her head—this is definitely unusual, since she is only a teenager, but not necessarily impossible. This scares her into thinking that she's prematurely aging, which in turn worries her about how she'll do in an upcoming "Youth Spirit" contest.note The Aesop of the episode, as delivered by their school's elderly lunch lady, who ended up winning the contest: "It's not how old you are, it's how you are being old!"
- An episode of The Fairly Oddparents plays this for laughs. Timmy's dad finds a gray hair in his nose and starts going on about how he's getting old. It leads to him buying a car and Timmy wishing to become it.
- The Simpsons: This happens to Marge Simpson when she finds one gray hair in her blue beehive. When she goes down to the beauty parlor to get rid of it, she (and the viewer) finds out that her hair is entirely gray already, but that the strong dye the parlor uses keeps knocking her out and causes short term memory loss. She decides to try going entirely grey for a while, but by the end of the episode, returns to using the dye.
- This is (possibly) a callback to a much earlier episode where Homer claims that Marge's hair actually started going gray all the way back in high school (when they were still only teenagers).
- Alvin and the Chipmunks once painted a small portion of Dave's hair white to give them an excuse to treat him like he was treating his Uncle Willie (aka, Uncle Adventure). Namely, treating him like he couldn't do anything by himself.
- There's an entire Johnny Bravo episode about this in season 4, where people at his gym suddenly start treating him like he's a decrepit old man, and Johnny discovers it's because he has his first grey hair. After several attempts at getting rid of the hair fails, Johnny gets a peptalk from Momma Bravo, and his refound confidence forces the hair back to its original color.
- Rugrats (2021): In "The Big Diff," Stu freaks out when he discovers his first gray hair (at the age of 33).
Real Life
- Elisabeth of Austria had famous long brown locks, and was so self-conscious of her gray hairs to the point where she tasked her hairdresser, Franziska "Fanny" Feifalik, with tweezing them.
- In some families, there's a hereditary trait of getting gray hairs at a younger-than-average age. Cue freaking out from teenagers that "I'm too young for this!"
OK, now that I'm done reading and editing, I'll comb my hair out. What??!! A gray hair? Have I spent that much time on TV Tropes?
