On Approaching 50 with Hot Pink Hair

Nine months ago, I walked into a hair salon and asked them to dye my hair hot pink. I was 47 years old. The stylist didn’t blink. Oakland has seen stranger things before breakfast.

Some background… I coach youth robotics. My son’s FTC robotics team, the Circuit Breakers, advanced to NorCal championships. Their jerseys were hot pink. So my co-coach and I matched them, full solidarity.

After the tournament, my co-coach let his hair grow out like a rational person. I kept mine, having finally traded the factory-default setting for a limited-edition upgrade

If I’m being real, my whole life my personal look has been as generic as they come. Average height, average build, white guy with brown hair and no distinguishing features. When I designed my character in Wii Sports, I picked the default starting avatar. My original Facebook profile pic? Same thing. Default silhouette captured it. The blank-faced, brown-haired template that stares back before you’ve customized anything.

My character creation strategy for the first 47 years of life

(There was a brief period in college when I had cornrows. This was before cell phones, which means the only evidence is buried in a shoebox at my Mom’s house next to my pog collection and a Spin Doctors CD. If there’s no digital evidence of this egregious cultural misappropriation, did it even happen?)

So why keep it? First and foremost, I do STEAM volunteer work with kids K-12 via Piedmont Makers and coach a lot of youth robotics. When you’re volunteering at events or showing up to competitions, you’re always just one adult face in a crowd of adult faces—teacher, parent, judge, someone’s uncle, or random guy who wandered in from the parking lot. Kids can’t tell who’s who. But with the pink hair, they remember me. They know I’m the robotics coach, the guy who runs the Makers events. To my face, the kids tell me it’s cringe. But I’ve heard them talking to their friends when they thought I wasn’t around – they secretly think it’s cool. Look, this is as close to street cred as a middle-aged suburban dad gets. Let me have it.

Most importantly, and unexpectedly, I now walk around the world and put smiles on people’s faces. Cashiers doing the customer service smile suddenly do the real one. TSA agents give me a wink. Little kids walking to school point and whisper like I’m a minor celebrity. Punks in downtown SF give the approving nod. To be clear, it’s not attention-seeking—I’m not riding a unicycle or carrying a pet parrot. To be honest, I don’t really like the attention. But getting to see dozens of strangers smile, many times a day? That I love.

On the other hand, in business settings, I’m sometimes self-conscious, particularly when the other person’s wearing the corporate uniform of muted ambition. I’ve learned to play it up: the nutty AI startup founder in Silicon Valley angle fits like a hot pink glove. When anyone asks about my hair, it’s a segue to talk about coaching kids and STEM, which (a) sounds endearing and (b) almost always gets them talking about their own kids and coaching sports. It breaks the ice faster than any deck slide about market opportunity and humanizes the conversation before we’ve opened PowerPoint.

The other down side: the maintenance is brutal. Hours to re-up—a full salon afternoon every 2 months. And expensive! Not Tesla expensive, but definitely cancel-a-few-streaming-services expensive. I mentioned this to a female friend and she looked at me with that particular blend of disbelief and derision reserved for men discovering basic facts about grooming: “Welcome to every middle-aged woman’s existence, Ben.” Who knew? Every woman I guess.

Oh, and a shout out to Hahn at Bettercuts on Piedmont Ave, who is my go-to guy for pink hair. He takes good care of me and never once suggested I reconsider.