Blond is the new blue.

or,

"He disagreed with something that ate him."

Can anybody guess where this is going yet? It's just a bit of social commentary for today: slightly over fifty years ago, Ian Flemming had his secret agent James Bond posit that Florida was full of older women with blue hair. That's the way it was in the 50s and 60s (and maybe the 40s and 30s, too: I don't know back that far). The point was that there was some kind of artificiality about the Floridian lifestyle, the blue hair being the symbol of it all. Flemming had a way of working that kind of social commentary into his work: in the same work, Live and let die, M states that "the negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions — scientists, doctors, writers ... They've got plenty of brains and ability and guts." Quite a daring statement in 1954.

So where did the blue-haired ladies go? They became blonds! My grandmother did the blue-hair thing back in the 50s and 60s (and 70s). My mother was a blond. In fact, I've started noticing that many women in their, shall we say, gray-hair years are not, gray, not blue, but blond (or brunette or, well you get the point).

This is empowerment. We don't see age as a type of branding: it's the true empowerment of "you're only as old as you feel." A woman's "life" does not end just because her hair turns gray, just because she reaches a certain age. That works for men, too. (Of course, its sad that a person would be judged by the color of their hair to begin with, but that's an entire other train of thought.)

So aging has a whole other dimension now. We age "young" and we look "young" as we age. We carry that with us now into a different type of aging. The older adult of the first decades of the 21st Century will be a completely character from the older adult of the mid-20th Century. Living longer, healthier lives, we will look the part. HOw about that, Ian Flemming?