What is your perceptions about people with gray hair?

I have just celebrated my 43rd birthday on the 4th March, and to be honest, I still feels like a young man in his 30's. Further inside my heart, I'm still a boy, still a mommy and daddy's boy, like I never grew older at all. I believe most of us guys feels the same, we are really sure that age is just a number and that it doesn't really reflects who we are actually inside.

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I'm not sure how the ladies are feeling though, I think women are highly sensitive about their age, to my opinion for them age is a reflections of their actual appearance and self value. In their thoughts, the older they get, the less attractive they become in the eyes of others. Ladies who are in their late 20's are the most sensitive kind, and has the most stressful life, especially the single ladies, I think. People today still thinks that the ideal age for the ladies to get married is 25, and for guys is 29. The most stressful moment is when they reach the dreaded number 30, where they are considered as "anak dara tua", a dreadful status that most ladies would want to avoid at all cost.

"anak dara tua" = "old virgin"

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When I was in my early 20's, because of my family genes, I already started having gray hair. I still remember my little cousin loves to pluck my gray hair out, and I will give her 10 cents for each grey hair as a reward. At first I get to paid her around 50 to 80 cents, but gradually it becomes RM1, RM1.50. When it reached RM2, I told her not to do it again, its obvious that my gray hair is getting more and more. I remember my grandma and my mom used to tell me, "don't pluck out your gray hair or it'll become more", and it never crosses my mind that what they said will come true, at 40 years old, 70% of my hair has turned white.

At first, I don't really care that my hair is gray, but all of that changed when someone thought that I was my father's younger brother, I just laughed when he said it. I told my wife about it and she urged me to dye my hair, I was reluctant at first as I don't really go to a hair saloon except for a haircut. When she volunteered to help and dye my hair, I agreed, and we bought one at Watsons. The first time that I dyed my hair black, I was really impressed, I do looked different, I looked much much more younger, I realized by then that the colour and our haircut style really plays an important role in our appearances.Since then, I started to be more cautious on my appearance and dyed my hair at least once a month.

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With my new appearance, I feel like my confidence and self esteem also grows, I am more confident meeting people, and it seems their confidence and perceptions on me also getting better. I'm not saying that people with gray hairs lacks respects from others, but I believe it is all down to the type of profession you are doing. If you are a businessman, a doctor, or a lawyer, peoples perceptions of you is different. You looked more intellectual, more intelligent and more experienced based on your profession. But imagine a client's or a customer's opinion about a building contractor who have a gray hair, they might think differently. In their mind they might have thought that the contractor is incapable to do a good job as he looks old and might be unable to supervise the works accordingly. Well, that is just my opinion.

Anyway, there are times when I purposely didn't dye my hair, but I kept my hair short and tidy, but once those salesladies saw me, they always greeted me by calling me "uncle". Even those ladies who are about the same age or older than me called me "uncle". Typical Malaysian. When something like that happened, I'll get my hair dyed black right away. Heck, not all people looks sexy with gray hair like Richard Gere, George Clooney or Pierce Brosnan.