Her hair has turned quite gold from grief.

The line hinges on a paradox: grief is imagined not as something that drains color (as in “turning white”), but as something that transforms it into “gold.” Wilde often treats beauty and suffering as intertwined, and “gold” can suggest both radiance and a kind of costly, hard-won change. The phrase may imply that sorrow has altered the woman so profoundly that even her appearance bears its mark—yet the mark is rendered in precious terms, complicating any simple reading of grief as purely disfiguring. It also plays with the aestheticization of pain: grief becomes visible, stylized, and almost ornamental, raising questions about whether the speaker is empathizing with suffering or converting it into art.