The voice of doom came on my birthday month of February, from West Virginia.

“Bad news, Chit, I can’t find your hair dye on store shelves anymore,” said my Stateside supplier, a most cherished brother-in-law, Lito.

In four months my last four tubes of ammonia and peroxide-free Clairol would be gone, my happily fraudulent days of warm-medium-brown hair would be over, and the horrors of hair-dye withdrawal would set in. Its residue would expunge itself slowly, visually painfully, leaving a rainbow of black, copper-brown, orange, and white—not unlike that we see on the scruffy coat of a certain mis-bred species of cats—before my hair turned finally wholly white.

I was certainly not ready for that—to be remembered looking even older than my mom. Prettier herself as she was at any comparable age, she died only a few years ago at 85—with a full head of jet-black hair!

I had waited until the last moment to use my last Clairol, at a stop in San Francisco en route to Martinsburg, West Virginia, in order to look my youngest for the wedding of Lito’s son Mikey in the June following his doomsday call. I had not lost, could not lose, hope. Clairol wouldn’t just disappear on me and similar others allergic to ammonia and peroxide without a suitable substitute.

Bless the Internet! Desperate backseat surfing pointed me to a professional-beauty-salon shop called Sally’s in downtown Martinsburg, not a half-hour’s drive away. Sure enough, there beckoned from the shelf, reassuringly, “Clairol professional,” a bit pricier than its predecessor and, I was warned, in yet limited supply. But right now I cared only for a reprieve, and got one for three months, with the last remaining, redeeming, three tubes.

No surrender

I just can’t see myself surrendering to a full white head like, say, a Nini Quezon, not even if my husband, with his own hair far more salt now than pepper, promises he won’t mind. My hair does not compare at all: falling hair is a family curse that in my case seems crossing genders. Thin hair looks bad enough on a woman and in any color, but yet in white!

In fact, white hair does not at all fit in the resolution I made upon turning 70—to make every effort to look good, and feel as good as I looked. And with my hair-dye supply somewhat secure again, I can concentrate on health and other beauty matters, of which, obviously, hair loss is the most urgent.

I have made some consultations with elders, principally my ageless friend, Tita Techie, who at her children’s prodding, began seeing a specialist from Singapore on thinning hair, a condition she herself had not been too concerned about.

“I had much rather invest in wigs, which in the long run might be even cheaper,” she says.

At any rate, she still yielded to treatment, and with much success: she now wears a decidedly fuller and seemingly darker undyed hair. I myself decided against going to her specialist, dissuaded by the warning that once one stopped the treatment all present and future hair would go.

Tita Techie is the precise character, diligent with duties and of the precise age for the expense to be worth it.

“At my age,” says she, recently 87, “how many treatments can I still have?”

A generation younger, I decided to go instead for a different treatment, itself widely credibly endorsed and more lenient to habitual quitters like me. If I’m not doing as well as I should, it’s because I don’t make my appointments faithfully enough. But I’m not doing badly either; for one thing, the falling seems arrested.

Gorgeous

At a recent wedding where Tita Techie and I happened to sit together and were soon comparing hair notes, Annie, a much younger common friend, Annie, came to join us, escorted by her husband, Arthur, proudly. After all, she had spectacularly lost seventy pounds in three months and was looking gorgeous, with nary a sign of the haggardness that usually accompanies sudden weight loss.

“It was a hormonal thing,” she said, explaining why all those yoga and gym classes and diets hadn’t worked. Once the hormonal culprits were determined, she said, she was put on a treatment that kept her inordinately fierce appetite in check and a regimen that called for a new combination of exercise and diet.

“Ha-a-ay,” Annie let out a long sigh. “But for how long do we women have to keep doing this?”

Tita Techie lifted both shoulders, looking away, and, me, I pursed my lips and possibly rolled my eyes. We may have indeed acquired the wisdom of the years, but still we didn’t have the heart to tell her—it takes a lifetime.