‘I started going grey at 19. A decade on, there is finally a woman who looks like me on TV’

Opinion: There’s a tiny detail in the new season of Ted Lasso that’s easy to miss, but it hit me like a freight train when I noticed it in the first episode – and I haven’t been able to stop noticing it since.

Coach Alice Chilton, played by 34-year-old Sex Education and The Other Bennet Sister star Tanya Reynolds, has grey hairs.

Not a full head of them, not a stripe of white at her roots, but a visible scattering of grey hair through her long dark hair.

It’s such a mundane, human detail most viewers probably haven’t given a second thought, but to me – a 30-year-old brunette who found her first grey hair more than a decade ago – it’s huge.

I have a weird relationship with my greys; I don’t love the way they stand out against my dark hair and insist on growing at the most bizarre angles possible, poking like wiry white spiders’ legs out of my hairline, along my temples and through my part.

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I hate that they’re even more obvious when I wear my hair up, which is why you’ll rarely catch me sporting a ponytail or updo.

But I also don’t care enough to pay for regular appointments to get them covered at a hair salon, or even to do it myself with box dye at home.

The global hair dye industry was reported to be worth more than $US26 billion ($36 billion) in 2022, and I have no doubt plenty of that would have come from people covering their greys.

I had my hairdresser put some colour over mine for my wedding earlier this year, and I tell myself that when they get worse I’ll cover them properly, but that’s it.

It leaves me in this odd middle ground where I know my greys there, and I know the beauty industry (and some people) would have me believe they’re an awful sign of ageing that should be covered in dye and hidden away.

I know I feel self-conscious about them, and agonise when I see a new smattering of grey in my hair.

But I also know I don’t want to spend all that time and money covering them, and I don’t want to be made to feel like I have to.

That’s where Reynolds comes in.

The no-nonsense women’s football coach wears her dark hair in a ponytail that shows off every grey hair and I love it more every time I see her on screen.

We don’t know if those greys are just Reynolds’ natural hair, if they were a creative decision from the Ted Lasso hair and makeup team, or a combination of both.

But seeing them on my TV screen once a week has brought me so much joy and comfort in my own greys.

For decades, there have only really been three kinds of women with grey hair on our TV screens:

• The grandmother figure, whose grey hair is a sign of her age and wisdom
• The fashionable older woman, who wears her grey hair like armour
• The younger woman, who discovers her first greys and has a crisis over it

There has been a wonderful push for women aged over 50 to embrace grey hair, led by the likes of Andie MacDowell, 68, Jamie Lee Curtis, 67, and Salma Hayek, 59.

But that doesn’t resonate for me at age 30.

Seeing a character like Chilton, whose greys are just there – not to make a statement, not as a plot device, and not as a symbol of her age – is a breath of fresh air.

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Every episode, I sit on my couch in awe of it: here is this clever, competent woman in her 30s who has grey hairs and is utterly unfazed by it.

Nor do her greys appear to have any impact on her job, or her relationships with her colleagues.

A 2025 study found that men were more likely to perceive people with grey hair as less attractive and less trustworthy than people with coloured hair.

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that women who don’t adhere to conventional beauty standards may be perceived as less competent in the workforce.

Not so for Chilton, whose greys are never even mentioned.

Only three episodes of Ted Lasso’s fourth season have aired so far, and for all I know Chilton’s hair could be mentioned or made over down the track.

But I hope they’re not.

I hope, for the many women who have greys in their 30s, 20s and teens, that Chilton is allowed to move through the show without a single reference to the grey in her hair in the same way that no one will mention the grey in Lasso’s.

Because it’s just hair, and I’d like to stop caring about the grey in mine too.