Newsmen's Coifs of Steel

(From The New York Daily News -- By Michele Ingrassia)

Call it THE ANDERSON EFFECT.

A year after ANDERSON COOPERS' salt-and-pepper buzz cut helped make him the IT-boy of TV news, gray hair is sprouting on the airwaves faster than A CHIA PET.

The latest -- NBC legal-affairs reporter DAN ABRAMS, whose dark brown 'do has given way to serious waves of gray.

For the record, Abrams refuses comment. But given that he's only a year older than the 38-year-old Cooper and projects the same men's-magazine glam, it's not surprising he might think there's gold in all that silver.

"There's definitely an Anderson effect," says colorist
LOUIS LICARI. "He's been able to bridge the gap -- he's old enough to have credibility and young and hip enough to attract a younger audience as well."

Which may be why every newscaster worth his contract wants to get into the act.

Gone are the days when ABC's SAM DONALDSON sported a shoe polish-brown rug.

Instead, the array of newsmen who've tossed their GRECIAN 2000 range from CNN's JOHN KING (salt-and-pepper) to
NBC's LESTER HOLT (increasingly steely at the temples) to
NBC's DAVID GREGORY (once described as blond and bushy haired, now gray and bushy haired) to CBS' HARRY SMITH and
ED BRADLEY (who work both the gray and the bald trends).
Even faux newsman JON STEWART has cascades of gray.

CARGO MAGAZINE'S Grooming Editor, AARON KRACH, says
it started with SEAN CONNERY being voted PEOPLE MAGAZINE'S SEXIEST MAN ALIVE.

"It was 1989, and there was a big brouhaha that he was so old and so gray," says Krach. "Now, we wouldn't think twice about it."

Still, gray does have its limits.

As BETH ZOLA, a senior colorist at THE WARREN-TRICOMI SALON, notes, the chances of newswomen letting their gray hair hang out are nil.

"It's a cliche," she says, "but you just won't see it."