"Look at your hair!" Oprah blurted out, before finishing her introduction. "What did you do to your hair?" the normally unflappable Oprah finally asked.

"Do you like it?," Palin replied. "I tried to look like you." "Yes, I'm not used to you having that many curls," said Oprah. "It's kind of cute, but I was just surprised to see you pop up there with the curls. Great. What's the weather like in Wasilla today?

For years, governance experts have urged adoption of measures that would prohibit a company's CEO from serving as board chairman because of the influence executives wield over directors. Legislation was introduced this fall in Congress that would separate the positions of corporate chairman and chief executive as well as giving investors a greater say in how directors are elected to company boards.

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Mackey, who held the Whole Foods chairman title since the high-end grocery chain started in 1978, will remain chief executive and a member of the board. Dr. John Elstrott, a director since 1995 and lead director since 2001, will become chairman as the company transfers the lead director's duties to that office.

Alex Brownsell and twins Sam and Lou Teasdale are, at the tender ages of 22 and 25, way ahead of their time. So far ahead of their time, in fact, that they have leapt the generations to join their grannies and gone grey -- by choice.

Yes, the colour wheel has finally twirled full circle. Growing numbers of women are no longer eschewing the very thought of grey, but embracing a gunmetal mane with pride -- and attitude. As Brownsell and the Teasdales prove, this is not only about silver foxettes going au naturel. This is a youth movement: from east London's cool set to models on the Paris catwalks, women are throwing the tonsorial rulebook out of the window and going with the grey. Even Victoria Beckham and Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs are getting in on the act by letting their own silver strands peep through.

"We had all been blonde for a long time," says Brownsell, who tends the tresses of east London’s fast crowd, as well as the X Factor contestants and a few select A-list clients. (She could name-drop Keira Knightley, Alice Dellal and Little Boots.) "We became obsessed with it being as white as possible, a mania we called 'blonde-orexia'." Eventually, the fixation led to grey dye. "I really liked it, so, rather than bleaching it out, I kept it," she says. "I quite like looking like a granny. I dress a bit like one, too." Brownsell and her fellow hip hairdresser, Lou Teasdale, who run the beauty blog www.beautyisareligion.com, say that after summer's frenzy for full-on pink, yellow, orange or blue hair, an understated grey is directional, classy and perfect right now.

Pixie Geldof, another fan of the supernan look, agrees. "I'd been blonde for three years and fancied a change," she says. "I wasn't thinking about the colour, I just put on a bunch of toner one day, and there it was. It was rad. I didn't want to do another colour like pink, grey just seemed obvious."

They offered shoppers designer goods including clothing and jewellery but would either provide counterfeit goods, or would take shoppers money and provide no goods at all.

Experts at Scotland Yard's e-crime unit have been monitoring the sites and today shut down 1,219 websites working under the codename Operation Papworth.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said the sites offered items including trendy Ugg boots and GHD hair straighteners as well as jewellery from Tiffany & Co and Links of London.

Now, despite the company's efforts to solicit input from a group of high-profile black women, including Cookie Johnson, wife of former basketball star Magic Johnson, some parents are saying the dolls aren't black enough. They complain that five of the six dolls feature fine-textured, waist-length hair; half of them have blue or green eyes. Moreover, all have the freakishly skinny body of a Barbie (something that irks some white parents as well).

"I thought it was unfortunate that once again we're given a doll with hair that is so unlike the vast majority of black women," says Cheryl Nelson-Grimes, the mother of a 7-year-old girl and a resident of Queens, N.Y. "I feel very strongly that I want my daughter to love herself for who she is and not believe that using a hot comb or straightening her hair is the only way to be beautiful." Still, her daughter Noni says that Grace, her doll from the new Mattel line, is her favorite "because she looks like me. She has black hair and has a ponytail."

The criticism over Mattel's new black fashion dolls underscores how difficult it is for large commercial companies to please a widely diverse black community with a single image or two depicting young African-Americans. "If they had given the dolls short, kinky hair or an Afro, people might have complained that it was too Afro-centric," says Nicole Coles, a 40-year-old mother from Temecula, Calif. "We're so hard and picky."