For citation: Fernández-Amaya, L. (2024). “Women empowered through grey hair: analysis of self-presentation on Instagram profiles”. In Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. & Bou-Franch, P. (Eds.) Evaluating Identities Online. Case Studies from the Spanish Speaking World (pp. 157-186). Palgrave Macmillan Abstract When most hairstyling salons had to close at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, many women stopped colouring their hair. This apparently insignificant gesture was construed as a female empowering act on social media, having an impact on their online presentation. When presenting themselves online, users strategically decide how much information they wish to disclose on their social media profiles (Atrill-Smith, 2019; Fullwood, 2019). These profiles thus help to construct a desirable online identity that reflects the way users would like to perceive themselves and be perceived by others (Bronstein, 2014). It appears that going grey was an integral part of the identity these women wished to reveal when presenting themselves online. The objective of the present chapter was to examine the discursive realisations of this group of women’s Instagram profiles. For that purpose, a corpus of 100 Instagram profiles in Spanish was collected and analysed from bottom-up/top-down perspectives using NVivo software. Results showed that the profiles contained multimodal self- presentations, i.e., a combination of text, hashtags (#), @mentions, hyperlinks and/or emojis. Regarding content, topics and images conveying the idea of the women’s transition towards empowerment were recurrent, helping them to construct a specific and recognizable online identity. Keywords: self-presentation, Instagram, empowerment, online identity 1. Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic brought about numerous lifestyle changes. For example, as most hairstyling salons had to close at the beginning of the lockdown, many women stopped colouring their hair. This apparently insignificant gesture was construed as a female empowering act on social media, which challenged mainstream notions of beauty. Many women, both famous and unknown, began to share their experiences of “embracing their grey hair” on Instagram accounts, such as “grombre” or “silver sisters”, among others. Instagram is a social media application used mainly to share photos and videos. It was launched in 2010 and was bought in 2012 by Facebook (recently renamed Meta). It grew rapidly, reaching 2 billion monthly active users globally by December 2021 (www.statista.com). Today, it is one of the most popular social media networks