If you happen to be even remotely tied to an industry where success depends on pleasing customers in any way, prepare to be judged at your job on criteria that have nothing to do with how well you perform. Take my friend, let's called him Peter, a 42-year-old sound engineer at an independent project studio in Northern California. The studio he works at, doesn't pull in a clientele of mature spoken-word artists. They mostly get rock musicians, teenagers who love the fact that they are young, with it, and that no one who is older than them will never get what it is that makes them tick. Now the sound engineer has an important role to play and how he understands what the producer wants, and what the musicians want, so that he can translate it into blackbox wizardry that can sound just the way they hear the music in their heads. If, that is, he is given a chance. At 42, my sound engineer friend, to his youthful clients, is well over the hill, one who can never understand what it is they want. One is the worst giveaways he has, is the way his hair has begun to show a little (actually, a lot) of salt and pepper. Men's salon visitor lists these days, are filled with customers not looking for a vanity boost, as much as people who are there for their very careers. There are lots of jobs out there where if you don't look much younger than you really are, you can expect to soon be out of a job.
There is such demand for the touching up of grays and any signs of aging, that major men's salon chains have begun offering home coloring kits, to help with busy schedules that can't work in a salon visit once every two weeks. The kits you get these days, are not about getting a helmet of unconvincingly uniform color. Products like Color Camo by Redken for Men, something you only get through visits to a salon, helps you keep a certain amount of fashionable gray, while the rest tries to match your natural color. If you have a lot of gray, you can take it down by 50%, or even three quarters, while the rest of your hair looks the golden or mahogany tone it really should have been. You can get any shade of brown, mixed with lighter shades, that a naturally graying head of hair would have, for a totally convincing effect.
Consider MiN New York's home coloring kits that go by the name Pepper. They go for $20 a box, and you get a great blend or uniform coverage, any way you please. If you want some strands of hair to not pick up the dye, you can use the gel they give you to cover those areas first. Every men's salon is doing unbelievable business in partial gray coverage these days. Of course, an Anderson Cooper or Richard Gere look can be wonderful if you can pull it off. But for the rest of us, a certain amount of distinguished scattered grays, are the best we can hope with a straight face.
How do these treatments really work? You just apply the dye to areas that are the most grey, usually at the temples. You let it soak in for a couple of minutes. Once you're sure that the areas you want fully colored are properly covered, you can just go rinse everything off. One of the best giveaways of the home job is leaked color. To make sure this doesn't happen to you, every men's salon makes sure that your hairline is coated with a heavy retardant line of moisturizer. You could do the same, and come away with great results.