Man Dyes Hair Purple Out of Solidarity for Wife With Alzheimer’s
A devoted husband asked a stylist to dye his hair purple to raise awareness for his wife’s Alzheimer’s disease. (Photo: Getty Images)
A Connecticut man took the “purple pledge” for Alzheimer’s disease in a very bold and loving way yesterday.
Barber and stylist Katherine Rose Kenney was in shock when one of her regular clients rolled into her salon, Roosters Men’s Grooming Center in Simsbury, Conn., and casually asked to have his hair dyed bright purple. Just as pink is the color of awareness for breast cancer, purple is the hue used to represent Alzheimer’s disease — an illness that the client’s wife has been battling.
When Kenney asked the doting husband how long he’d like the hair color to last, he responded, “Well, we’ve been married for 47 years, so the longer the better.” Kenney tells Yahoo Beauty: “It broke my heart. I started tearing up and said, ‘Let’s do it!’ and hopped off the floor with joy.”
Prior to this encounter, Kenney and her client had only ever made small talk when he visited the salon for a haircut once or twice a year. “He’s very quiet and soft-spoken,” says Kenney, who, until that moment, had no idea the man’s wife had Alzheimer’s, an illness that afflicts about 5.1 million Americans, according to the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. The foundation also estimates that one in four family members acts as a caretaker for someone with the disease.
It’s also fitting that the man squeezed in his heartfelt gesture on June 30, the very last day of Alzheimer’s Awareness Month. “He found out about it a little late,” says Kenney. Although the hair salon doesn’t stock bright purple hair dye, the client was fortunate in that Kenney herself actually had a stash of bold hues at home.
“The only color we offer is simply to camouflage gray hair with their natural color,” she said in her Facebook post. “Lucky for us, I have an obsession with hair products and bought the whole line of Joico Color Intensity.” The client made an appointment for the following day and Kenney brought in one of her favorite colors from the line: an amethyst purple. “When I got the color I had said to myself, I’m gonna wait to use this on something awesome. So it’s amazing that this happened.”
Kenney was not only happy to be indulging her client’s request to support his wife and her illness, but she loved interacting with him in a way she never had before.
“It’s sad how many people are affected by Alzheimer’s each day and how little funding goes towards it,” she wrote in a post on the Love What Matters Facebook account. “It weighed heavy on my heart today as we lightly discussed the disease. He looked me in the eyes and told me that he just wanted to feel like he could do something, anything at all to help, and his hair was the only thing he felt that he could control.”
Kenney told Yahoo Beauty that the man’s wife has been battling Alzheimer’s for six years and is currently living in a medical facility. “She told him that as long as he goes to see her, she knows she’ll be OK.” Kenney also learned that the couple has 10 children together.
As for the purple hair, Kenney knows people will stare — and that’s the point. As she put it, if you see an older man walking around Connecticut “with vivid amethyst purple hair, realize he is trying to bring attention to himself, so he can bring attention to the cause. This is a man deeply devoted to the love of his life.”
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