Deirdre's SILVR Story

Berlin, GermanyShared July 23, 2026

My name is Deirdre Tull. I’m 62, and I started my silver journey nine years ago. I was born in Cork and moved to Berlin with my family in the early 1970s, when I was ten. By sixteen I was deep into the Berlin punk scene: bleach, black dye, colours that had no business being called colours. Nobody’s hair was meant to look natural back then, so when real silver showed up in my late twenties, it just disappeared into the mess. It became a problem later, once I’d left the punk years behind and fallen for vintage style, proper 1920s and 30s silhouettes. That look needed neat hair, not grey roots. So I started colouring every two to three weeks for the best part of two decades. Some of those dye jobs were dreadful. I kept going anyway. My husband Klaus changed things. He said the silver streak at my temple was the part of my hair he liked best. I was 53. A year later I found a Berlin colourist who eased the dark down gradually, brown, then honey, then dirty blonde, cutting it shorter twice along the way to keep the regrowth line soft. I wore vintage headscarves through the transition. He guessed I was 70 percent silver under the blonde. It was closer to 90. Nine years on, my hair is fully silver, and it suits the vintage clothes better than the dark ever did. It needs far less upkeep than the old colouring routine ever did. I get more compliments now than I ever did, punk or otherwise. Women often ask how I found the nerve to stop colouring. I tell them they don’t have to do it alone, there are whole communities of women doing this together, and the woman on the other side of it is usually more herself than the one holding the colour back.