I recently got an e-mail from a woman in Kentucky, US, telling me that she had been in Malta on holiday with her family at Eastertime and they had noticed something slightly peculiar and might I perhaps have an answer to their conundrum?

“Why is it that so many of the Maltese women dye their hair red?” she asked. “Is it just fashion? Does it have anything to do with religion? We wondered why, we’ve now been back home for a few months and still asking,” she wrote.

I read the e-mail and went Oh.

Despite my seemingly international fame as a connoisseur of Maltese coiffure, I had never really consciously registered this phenomenon. Then I started walking in the streets and looking around me, and, mmm, she had a point.

“Have you noticed this?” I asked my girl friends this morning. We are on our annual girls’ break in Gozo, the perfect setting to discuss matters of cosmic importance such as this.

I love how our conversations flow seamlessly from heated Brexit discussions to how ridiculous Boris Johnson looks with dyed hair; from migration issues to school curriculum issues; from Panama papers to the new Kiabi that opened in Burmarrad. When men are present, discussions have a completely different (louder) dynamic, I find.

But back to red dye. There was a lengthy pause, and then they all started nodding. “It’s not post-office red or look-I’ve-gone-punk red. It’s more of a village-festa red,” said one.

“You don’t find that in England,” said the Brit. “Maybe red dye is the equivalent of the blue rinse.”

We discussed several options: maybe because of our Mediterranean olive skin, Maltese women cannot really afford to go blondish to hide their grey; or maybe brown or black dye would just be too pitch dark and fake? Or maybe hairdressers buy it in bulk and they get a nice commission on it? Or maybe going red is a way of retaining the feistiness after the shock of going grey?

Inevitably, we turned to our hair. Two of us do highlights every now and then to cover the grey; the most organised of us all manages to effectively hide the white strands by shifting the parting; and I pluck out any white hair whenever I spot one, which admittedly is increasing in frequency.

Maybe red dye is the equivalent of the blue rinse

“What?! Don’t pluck!” they all holler. “You’ll get seven more for each one you pluck out.” I do the maths quickly and calculate that at this rate, by this time next year, I’ll have the Queen Elizabeth look.

Talking of queens: you know how Queen Marie Antoinette of France turned stark white after her capture during the French Revolution? I am not sure how that happened – is stress a hydrogen peroxide sans the bottle? – but there are instances in my life when I can feel the rush of blood being drained out of my head and I think oh God, there goes some colour sucked out of yet another hair.

In any case, we debated whether we should eventually start dyeing or going silver foxes. I tell them about a friend of mine who last year decided she had had enough of keeping up with the regrowth and went natural. She lasted a year with badger hair. “I got tired of the odd looks and the questions.” She has dyed it again and will now will give the look another go when she’s in her 50s.

The thing is, greying locks are de mode these days. Classic celebrities like Judy Dench, Helen Mirren and Jamie Lee Curtis have long championed grey hair. But now even Demi Moore, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez, Nicole Kidman have stepped out with a few strands of grey hair.

Then there’s of course the French Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. We all agreed that she looks absolutely stunning. But would we do it? Or would we be happy to sit in the hairdresser’s chair every month with tin foil in our hair?

We asked the children what they thought of the idea of greying mothers. Four girls and two boys voted unanimously against. The 11-year-old went so far as to tell us: “My children will not be allowed to have a granny with grey hair.” The Significant Other will of course be reading this in aghast. He thinks one salt-and-pepper member in the family is enough. It’s odd isn’t it how society is more accepting of men ageing naturally but less so of women?

Which of course brings us to men. Across board there is common consensus that men should not ever, ever reach for the bottle. Who was it that once wrote, ‘Never say dye if you want to be a real man’?

Madame Kentucky, I am truly sorry for I have reached the end of this column, and still not solved the mystery of Maltese women and their red hair. But at least there’s one advice I can give you: please do not vote for Trump, he dyes his hair.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti