More than once, Hillary Clinton has turned to jokes about her hair to get out of a jam.

On Wednesday, Clinton again turned to her famous and ever-changing hair — she wears it these days in a shorter bob — to deftly address one of the most delicate questions confronting her campaign: her age. If elected, Clinton will be 69 when she assumes office, which would make her the second oldest president after Ronald Reagan.


“All of our presidents come into office looking so vigorous,” Clinton said at a campaign stop in South Carolina. “Then we watch them. They grow grayer and grayer and by the time they leave? They’re as white as the building they live in.”

“Now I may not be the youngest candidate in the race,” Clinton continued, building slowly to her punch line and employing a Southern drawl. “But I have one big advantage: I’ve been coloring my hair for years.” Clinton smiled cheekily and the crowd erupted in laughs and cheers. “Nooooooo,” she said, shaking her finger and smiling. “You’re not going to see me turning white in the White House.”

When it comes to her hair, Clinton long ago made the decision to be in on the joke — in part because she recognized that even something so seemingly trifling could have political significance. Other women in politics said the comment about not going white in the White House speaks to an unfortunate double standard for women seeking office.

“We are totally judged by our appearances,” said Melissa Mark-Viverito, a rising star in New York politics who serves as speaker of the New York City Council. “These are things that come to mind when you’re getting up and getting dressed — I am going to be criticized. We have to deal with it, and gentlemen don’t. It is a factor, and that is unfortunately something that I recognize.”

Clinton herself has understood that for decades, dating back at least to her early years in the White House. Back then, it wasn’t just her own hair and appearance that were scrutinized — Bill Clinton suffered a torrent of bad publicity after the May 1993 revelation that two of Los Angeles International Airport’s four runways were shut down for nearly an hour and Air Force One idled on the tarmac while the president got an on-board haircut from a hairstylist to Hollywood stars.

“If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle,” she quipped in 1995, when she was first lady and had recently graduated out of headbands.

That same year, after Clinton’s health care plan was defeated and blamed for the walloping the Democrats took in the midterm elections during Bill Clinton’s first term, Clinton leaned on her locks as part of a charm offensive.

At the Gridiron Dinner, a black-tie gala attended by D.C. journalists and politicians, Clinton starred in a spoof video as “Hillary Gump,” poking fun of her constantly changing hairdos.

“Mama always told me, Hillary, Hillary Gump, life is like a hairstyle,” said Clinton, doing her best Forrest Gump imitation under a black bouffant wig. “You just keep changing it till you find something that works.” At one of her lows in popularity, the taped segment received a standing ovation from the crowd. “Few other things we tried to do in Washington went as smoothly,” Clinton wrote of the hit skit in her memoir “Living History.”

After winning election to the Senate, Clinton kept the hair jokes as part of her needling-the-media routine.

At a Class Day speech to her alma mater, Yale University, in 2001, then-Sen. Clinton deadpanned: “The most important thing I have to say to you today is that hair matters. This is a life lesson my family did not teach me, Wellesley and Yale Law School failed to instill: Your hair will send significant messages to those around you. What hopes and dreams you have for the world, but more, what hopes and dreams you have for your hair. Pay attention to your hair, because everyone else will.”

“The fact that she recognizes it as a joke just goes to her smarts,” Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, said of Clinton’s hair commentary. The decades-long interest in Clinton’s hair, Solis Doyle said, “is a joke. It shouldn’t be taken very seriously.”

Admitting to a dye job, like Clinton did Wednesday, is an easy way for a candidate to appear authentic and self-aware. “Pointing it out and not letting it get to you is sometimes the best way to address [the double standard],” Mark-Viverito said.

Clinton’s not the only female politician doing it. During her run for New York City mayor in 2013, Christine Quinn referred to her signature red hair as “the color of my hair which God never created” and admitted in an interview with New York magazine that because of a need to maintain her roots she spent “more on hair than the average New Yorker.”

Clinton’s commentary about hair doesn’t appear to be reserved merely for the public stage. She’s embraced it in more private settings, too.

Last year, when Clinton was in New York stumping for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, she ran into Quinn backstage at the Grand Hyatt. Quinn had recently chopped off her red bob and sported a shorter crop.

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” Clinton exclaimed, according to Quinn,“but I love your haircut!”