Kelly Ripa Considers Ditching Her Blonde Hair, Says It ‘Wants to Be Gray’

Kelly Ripa is thinking about going gray. The Live! With Kelly and Mark co-host discussed the possible aesthetic change with husband Mark Consuelos during Wednesday’s episode of their morning talk show as she reflected on the “endless” hair coloring process that her signature blonde locks require. 

“I got my hair colored last night and I cannot tell you how long it takes now to cover my gray hair,” Ripa, 53, told her husband, also 53. “It’s an endless… you came in last night like, ‘Are you done?’” Ripa continued that despite “hours and hours” of coloring, “I swear this morning, I still see gray hair.”

“My hair wants to be gray. It just wants to be gray,” she stated. Consuelos wondered what his wife thought of just “letting the gray happen,” which shocked Ripa into silence for a few moments. “You’re not ready yet,” he followed up, as Ripa insisted, “No, I would do it.” 

“I just don’t think, you know, you’ve seen my gray hair,” she continued. “It’s not like a gorgeous silver or a pretty white. It’s almost like, translucent. It’s almost translucent in its quality, which I think is weird. It’s almost like colorless hair.” Consuelos joked, “So maybe keep that.”

Ripa’s grays have been a topic of discussion since the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2022, Ripa told her former co-host Ryan Seacrest that she had “embraced [her] gray hair privately” during the pandemic “while publicly I was using brown eyeshadow to paint my roots some shade that wasn’t Santa Claus white.” Ultimately, she said she decided to follow in the footsteps of none other than Cher. 

“Cher was saying that gray hair is not for her. She is not caving in, she doesn’t care about the trend – you know, people are embracing their gray hair all over the place. Everybody’s embracing their gray hair,” she noted at the time, adding that other women who want to embrace their natural hair color absolutely should. “I think certain people look great with their gray hair,” she insisted. “I think it depends on the person. I really do.”

In May 2020, Ripa explained on Live! how she was managing her gray hair at home amid the shutdown, noting that the texture of her hair was changing as she got older. “Gray hair has a different texture. Anyone with gray hair can tell you, it’s very wired. It tends to stand up,” she said. “These little clips, and you can see I’ve sprayed them brown too, these little clips really, like, hold the gray.” As Seacrest assured his co-star that her hair all looked blonde to him, Ripa joked in response, “That’s good. That’s excellent. It’s all part of my sinister plan to fool you.”