It’s all a matter of opinion...

Thanks so much to all of you who gave up the time recently to take our survey. It’s been absolutely fascinating seeing all of your answers coming through and we feel like we’ve already learnt a lot. As you’re the ones who put in the hard work, we thought you would be interested in the results. So, here are our ‘headlines’:

• The vast majority of you (83%) dyed your hair to hide the grey before you embraced it; and for many of you, this was for a significant period of time: 58% of you dyed it for more than 10 years and 30% for more than 20 years.
• It seems the two ‘M’s (money and mirrors) were, in the main, responsible for the decision to embrace your grey. 32% of you said that the cost and hassle of keeping up the dye was the main reason for stopping while another 31% of you said you realised your dyed hair just didn’t look that good anymore.
• It was almost 50:50 as to whether or not you looked for help when you decided to ditch the dye - if you did, you tended to ask your hairdresser or get inspiration from magazines, but more than one of you said “There wasn’t much help around when I decided to do it”. Hopefully, that’s changing now.
• What’s great is that two-thirds of you don’t think your grey hair makes you look any older. And even BETTER - of the third of you that do, a whopping 80% of you don’t care. For a brand that has both its feet (and heart) firmly in the anti ‘anti-ageing’ camp, this is music to our ears.
• When we asked how you feel about your hair colour, almost half of you were emphatic with ‘Love it!’ Another 15% of you wish you’d ditched the dye years ago. But, as with any hair colour, we can all have bad hair days and 25% of you are mostly happy but admit to struggling with it from time to time. Less than 3% of you don’t like it or are tempted to hit the bottle again (don’t worry, we won’t hold it against you if you go back to the ‘dark - or red or blonde - side’; we’re not the hair police here).

We thought this would be the case as surely it’s a universal truth (?) - but you told us that how you feel about your hair has a massive impact on your overall self-confidence - the average score on a scale of 1 to 10 was 9. But the good news is that hopefully, our confidence is on the up - nearly all of you (93%) say that perceptions of grey hair are getting more positive - and that can only be a good thing. Jayne has been reading all the results too and said:

“It's great to hear all of your comments, and many of them sound very familiar to me. Like many of you, I dyed my hair for years - almost 30 in fact - before embracing my grey. And while, on the whole I love my new colour, I'm also with the 25% of you who still get those days when it can just feel a bit *sigh*. One of our ambitions at White Hot is to make these days ever more few and far between, so we hope you will come along on that journey with us. Thanks again for your continued support.

  So, how does this all sound to you? Does it feel familiar, or is there anything that is way out of kilter to you? Either way, we’d love to know more - please do comment on the blog post here.