Your roots are an inch deep and you don't hate them anymore. That is the thing nobody warned you about. You started getting highlights in your late twenties because that was what everyone did, sat under foils every twelve weeks, asked for the same finish you'd had for years because it was easier than explaining what you actually wanted. Now you're scrolling Instagram and every other woman's hair looks softer, more lived in, more like it grew that way, and yours looks like it

You found three of them this morning and now you can't stop looking. One at the temple, two near the parting, glinting back at you under the bathroom light. You're 42, maybe 45, and you've spent twenty years not really thinking about your hair colour beyond whether it looks nice. Now suddenly you're standing in front of the mirror with a decision to make. Do you reach for the box dye, book in for a tint, or do you do the thing that secretly terrifies you and let them come thr

You keep tying it up because you can't look at it. The balayage you saved for, the highlights you waited months to book, the colour that was supposed to make you feel like yourself again, and now you avoid mirrors. The bands. The brass. The patches where the lightener clearly stopped working halfway through. You've read every Reddit thread, watched every TikTok, and now you're sat here wondering if it can even be fixed or whether you just have to grow it out and live with it

Most women going grey are being sold the wrong service, and nobody in the industry is telling them. I am Marta Davies. I run Hair By Marta in Market Drayton, and a large part of my week is spent fixing grey blending that has gone wrong somewhere else. Banding, brassiness, harsh regrowth lines, hair that has been stretched too thin by aggressive lightening. The same problems, over and over, in women who were told this would be the easy way out of root colour. I wrote this beca