Upgrade: Deborah Pagani Silver Hair Pin

This large Deborah Pagani hair pin looks like a modern money clip or elegant murder weapon.

I never realized just how embarrassingly susceptible I am to the lure of pretty things until I was stuck at home for months on end with nothing but the internet and a credit card to keep me entertained.

This Deborah Pagani silver plated hair pin (Saks Fifth Avenue) looks like a sculpture or a murder weapon and is a much more elegant hair tamer than a plastic, drugstore claw clip. Its creator, Deborah Pagani, posts calming Instagram videos where she twists her (abundant, never frizzy) hair into a bun before effortlessly anchoring it with one of her heavyweight pins.

After a couple of lopsided results, I think I have it down. I rake my favourite leave-in conditioner through my hair (Rene Furterer Absolue Keratine Repairing Beauty Cream) before I begin to twist, and the result is a satisfying cross between a bun and a French twist. It’s worthwhile remembering that achieving an effortless ‘not trying too hard’ look actually requires some effort. And best of all there is no plastic claw clip in sight.

Rene Furterer’s Keratine Absolue line smooths even the wiriest of wiry hair.

The Nice List: Gifts For All the (Newly) Silver Ladies

Whether by active choice or bowing to circumstance, there are a lot more silver-haired women roaming our streets. As a long-standing silver, it is thrilling to see women really leaning into their newfound follicular DGAF.

Appearing in photographs with visible regrowth is now the new power move. (Viz this portrait of foreign affairs specialist Fiona Hill that accompanied her New Yorker magazine profile this past summer.)

Fiona Hill

But culture-shifting semiotics aside, there is a learning curve that accompanies this dramatic change.

Choosing silver is not the maintenance-free lark some would assume. Despite not having to police your hairline for regrowth, you now have to keep your hair from absorbing any airborne pollutants, or it goes a dingy yellow like you’ve been spending your days in a dark, smoky bar.

If you have a friend who has made the switch (Hi, Sue!) support and encourage them with any of these gifts:

The gold standard, the pure, uncut, good stuff, Kerastase Masque Ultra Violet, $69, will bring hair back from the brink, conditioning dried out hair (silver gets very, very dry) and transforming any yellow strands to a piercing silver. Some brave souls even leave it on for hours to tint their hair a soft purple, but that is a very off-label use and you didn’t hear it from me.

Mixed Feelings Purple Leave-In Blonde Toning Drops, $38, Sephora are an easy way to tend to silver hair. Add a couple of drops of this intensely pigmented, purple serum to a favourite styling product to neutralize brassy colour for pure silver hair. This is one of those genius ‘how has no one thought of this before?’ products.

The Manta hair brush is perfect for delicate silver hair

The small but mighty brush from Manta hair comes with an origin story that might make you weepy. Gentle enough for even the most fragile silver-to-white hair, the silicone and bendable Manta was created by a stylist whose wife developed a fear of conventional stiff bristled brushes as she lost her hair to cancer treatment. Manta’s flexible bristles bring gentle order to hair, but still feel like a soothing head scratch. It’s perfect if going silver has turned your formerly sturdy hair into delicate cotton candy fluff.

Silver hair an be infuriatingly delicate and susceptible to colour change from pollution and water deposits and you don’t realize that it’s gone faintly (ugh) yellow until you wash it, so scrupulous maintenance is the key. L'Oreal Professionel’s SerieExpert Silver holiday gift box of shampoo and conditioner is two behemoth bottles (500 ml) of brass neutralizing magic. OK, not magic, science. But the sparkle they give hair seems magical.

Colour Boost

You don’t realize how much life your hair colour adds until you go silver and the colour seemingly drains from your face as your features all but disappear (just giving it to you straight.) Draw your features back on with a few key items, so people know where to look when talking to you.

19/99 Beauty’s Colour Kit One is everything you need in one covetable pouch

19/99 Beauty, the clever new line from two former Bite Beauty execs, just released their all-in-one Colour Kit One, $79: two eye pencils, one dark and one light and shimmery for definition and highlight, a smudging brush and their singular, universally-wearable red pencil Voros, plus a sharpener to keep them all ‘on point’ (sorry) all in a vivid, graphic pouch that is easy to spot in your bag.

Charlotte Tilbury Filmstar Bronze & Glow dual palette is life-giving colour made portable.

Charlotte Tilbury’s popular FilmStar Bronze and Glow dual palette, mini $40 is a portable quick fix for pallor. You can safely ignore the ‘sculpt’ edict, which is for 20something Instagram makeup aficionados, and use the bronze shade on the outer perimeter of your face to softly add depth, and the highlight to bounce light off the high points of your face.

Maybelline Falsies Lash Lift is the lashes of your youth returned to you

I will never understand the allure of pricy mascara. Mascara needs to be tossed every three months for hygiene’s sake, plus the best are always the drugstore brands anyway. You will have to pry the Maybelline from my cold dead hands. Their $12.99 Falsies Lash Lift mascara gives you of the lashes you once had by adding the perfect amount of thickening fibres without clumping.

Kérastase Fresh Affair Dry Shampoo Smells Like You Moved Into a Higher Tax Bracket

Inside this can lies your better self

On the days that you are hanging by a thread and dry shampoo is your lifeline, you do not need to be reminded that everything has gone pear-shaped. And the last thing you want is some boring, mass-market-smelling, ‘good enough’ dry shampoo. What you need is someone kind who says “hey, it happens to the best of us,” and maybe also a dry shampoo that smells as if (for the brief moment that you are spraying) your life is actually perfect, not just merely ok.

Kérastase Fresh Affair Refreshing Dry Shampoo is scented with neroli, the blossom from the bitter orange tree, so it smells like the very best, most expensive eau de cologne. And it contains rice starch to efficiently absorb the (sorry to use this ugly word) ‘grease’ that has flattened your hair. But it also has vitamin E, so that same hair won’t becomes dried out and brittle. And the neroli scent gently lingers, giving you blissful little whiffs of your expensive-smelling self for hours after you spray.

There’s even a small travel size available, so when we return to the gym (I really miss the gym) you will be the fanciest lady at the communal mirror, hands down.