On December 9, 2020, Robin Salls sat at her computer, two years into letting her hair go silver, and got fed up. Not with her hair. With the silence — the total absence of anyone creating media for women who looked like she was starting to look.
So she did something most of us might think about, and never follow up on. She made a social media post announcing that Tangled Silver Magazine would launch in January 2021, mocked up a cover, and hit send. She had not built the magazine. She had not, in any real sense, planned it.
Ten minutes later, her husband came upstairs.
“He said, ‘What did you just do?’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ He’s like, ‘Have you even talked to anybody?’ I’m like, ‘Nope, but I got like six weeks to get it done.’ And then he was like, ‘I’m not even gonna ask.’ And he turned and went downstairs.”
That is the whole woman, right there. Robin Salls does not wait for permission, a business plan, or a focus group. “I am a person who kind of gets more fueled by my fear,” she told me. The announcement wasn’t reckless. It was strategy. If I do it, then I’m going to make it happen. Because if I just kept toying with the idea, it would just sit there.
Author’s note: When Robin told me that story, I was like “this is my kind of person.” I have a card in my office that says “Start before you’re ready”—kind of like I started this podcast and Substack project.
Robin calls herself a serial entrepreneur since age 14 — the babysitter who showed up with a bag containing everything you could possibly need. Radio sales, insurance, wine-tasting events. She’d spent decades, in her words, treading water. None of it was magazine publishing.
What she had instead was taste and a hunch. She was a lifelong magazine reader who knew exactly what made her lose hours in the pages. And in 2020, with her wine events shut down by the pandemic, she had time to notice what was missing.
“I was mad because I didn’t see pictures of women that looked like what I thought I looked like. It was still lots of outdated little old ladies in rocking chairs. I love little old ladies in rocking chairs — I love my grandmother in her rocking chair, I still have her rocking chair — but I didn’t like the images that made it feel like, oh, you hit 50 and suddenly life stops.”
The six weeks that followed were a crash course in becoming legitimate. ISSN numbers. Library of Congress registration. Trademarking. Figuring out which women she’d dare to ask onto the cover of a publication that didn’t yet have a single page. She funded it herself, started small, and launched what she calls her love letter to the silver community — knowing it was a rough draft and planning to fix it as she went.
The response answered her hunch fast. In the first three months, more women signed up than she’d gathered in eight years of wine events.
Here’s where Robin’s story stops being a feel-good launch tale and becomes something sharper. The natural advertisers for a magazine celebrating midlife beauty are, of course, the very companies built on the word anti-aging.
She’s tested their products. Some are genuinely good. But when a large company insisted on anti-aging messaging, Robin asked if they’d consider language about being your best self where you are instead. The answer was no — they wanted the anti-aging message to stay.
“I have opted to walk away from advertisers that are adamant they want to keep messages that are against everything I feel in my core. It is very hard. It hasn’t always been easy. That’s probably why I can’t tell you we’re up there in the ranks of Vogue.”
She’s not anti-color. She colored her own hair for 25 years. “I’m anti someone telling me I have to color to be relevant.” A digital magazine, it turns out, makes money three ways: subscriptions, advertisers, and — increasingly — community. And the community is where the real revolution lives.
If you’re sitting at your kitchen table wondering whether your idea is real, Robin has been exactly where you are. Here’s what she’d tell you:
Announce it out loud before you talk yourself out of it. Robin posted her launch publicly with nothing built. The commitment forced the work. A dream you only plant, she says, “would just sit there not done.”
Find a stranger who’ll be honest with you. Skip the spouse and the daughter at first. “Sometimes having somebody who’s not that attached to you is a better starting point — they’re not as vested, so they’ll give you their real experiences and then you get to decide what to risk.”
Treat your experience as your edge, not your résumé. Robin had never published a magazine. What she had was decades of knowing what grabbed her as a reader. You’re not starting from zero either.
Protect the mission over the money. Robin turns down advertisers whose message contradicts hers. The grassroots magazine grows slower, but it grows on her terms.
Own the wisdom you’ve earned. Her advice for women worried about gray hair in a job interview: stop apologizing for your age and redirect. “Here are my skills. Here’s what I bring to your table. Focus on that.”
Somewhere along the way, the hair stopped being the point. Talking with the women she spotlighted, Robin kept hearing the same thread — that once they shed the fear of accepting their silver, a hundred other fears started falling away too. One woman, in her late seventies, told Robin she only kept coloring because her husband — a full silver fox himself — wanted her to stay the redhead he met. That double standard became fuel.
This is the gender wealth gap and the ageism gap wearing a beauty-industry costume. Robin has watched advertisers chase a younger market that doesn’t yet have money to spend, while ignoring the midlife women who do. “As women get older, we get more vocal, especially when we realize we can actually use our voices.” Her magazine, her annual The Silverhood Experience, the watch parties she’s planning across the country — they’re all infrastructure for women learning they never had to ask permission in the first place.
She built that infrastructure with no funding, no publishing background, and a husband who learned to stop asking what she’d just done. The world keeps telling women their stories slow down at 50. Robin’s grandparents lived into their late nineties. By her math, the story’s barely half over.
“We don’t realize we don’t have to ask. We get to give it to ourselves.”
So what gap have you been mad about — and what would happen if you hit “post” before you were ready?
Find Robin Salls and Tangled Silver Magazine:
Website: TangledSilverMagazine.com (subscribe, read the magazine, and get tickets to the Silverhood Experience)
The Silverhood Experience: September 17–19, at the woman-owned Magnolia Hotel in Denver, Colorado
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinsalls/
Email: robin@tangledsilvermagazine.com (she’s notoriously good about writing back)
Check out the podcast of this interview, or those of any of the amazing women that I’ve interviewed.
If Robin’s story lit something up in you, subscribe to Build Your Own Boat — and forward this to the woman in your life who keeps saying “someday.” You know who she is.
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