Blond (male), blonde (female), or fair hair, is a hair color characterized by low levels of the dark pigment eumelanin. The resultant visible hue depends on various factors, but always has some sort of yellowish color. The color can be from the very pale blond (caused by a patchy, scarce distribution of pigment) to reddish "strawberry" blond or golden-brownish ("sandy") blond colors (the latter with more eumelanin). Because hair color tends to darken with age, natural blond hair is generally very rare in adulthood. Naturally-occurring blond hair is primarily found in populations of northern European descent and is believed to have evolved to enable more efficient synthesis of Vitamin D, due to northern Europe's lower levels of sunlight. Blond hair has also developed in other populations, although it is usually not as common, and can be found among natives of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, among the Berbers of North Africa, and among some Asians.
In human culture, blond hair has long been associated with female beauty. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was reputed to have blond hair. In ancient Greece and Rome, blond hair was frequently associated with prostitutes, who dyed their hair using saffron dyes in order to attract customers. The Greeks stereotyped Thracians and slaves as blond and the Romans associated blondness with the Celts and the Germans to the north. In western Europe during the Middle Ages, long, blond hair was idealized as the paragon of female beauty. The Norse goddess Sif and the medieval heroine Iseult were both significantly portrayed as blond and, in medieval artwork, Eve, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin Mary are often shown with blond hair. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scientific racists categorized blond hair and blue eyes as characteristics of the supreme Nordic race. In contemporary culture, blond women are often stereotyped as sexually attractive, but unintelligent.
Video Blond
Etymology, spelling, and grammar
Origins and meanings
The word "blond" is first documented in English in 1481 and derives from Old French blund, blont, meaning "a colour midway between golden and light chestnut". It gradually eclipsed the native term "fair", of same meaning, from Old English fæ?er, causing "fair" later to become a general term for "light complexioned". This earlier use of "fair" survives in the proper name Fairfax, from Old English fæ?er-feahs meaning "blond hair".
The French (and thus also the derived English) word "blond" has two possible origins. Some linguists say it comes from Medieval Latin blundus, meaning "yellow", from Old Frankish blund which would relate it to Old English blonden-feax meaning "grey-haired", from blondan/blandan meaning "to mix" (Cf. blend). Also, Old English beblonden meant "dyed", as ancient Germanic warriors were noted for dyeing their hair. However, linguists who favor a Latin origin for the word say that Medieval Latin blundus was a vulgar pronunciation of Latin flavus, also meaning "yellow". Most authorities, especially French, attest the Frankish origin. The word was reintroduced into English in the 17th century from French, and was for some time considered French; in French, "blonde" is a feminine adjective; it describes a woman with blonde hair.
Usage
"Blond", with its continued gender-varied usage, is one of few adjectives in written English to retain separate masculine and feminine grammatical genders. Each of the two forms, however, is pronounced identically. American Heritage's Book of English Usage propounds that, insofar as "a blonde" can be used to describe a woman but not a man who is merely said to possess blond(e) hair, the term is an example of a "sexist stereotype [whereby] women are primarily defined by their physical characteristics." The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records that the phrase "big blond beast" was used in the 20th century to refer specifically to men "of the Nordic type" (that is to say, blond-haired). The OED also records that blond as an adjective is especially used with reference to women, in which case it is likely to be spelt "blonde", citing three Victorian usages of the term. The masculine version is used in the plural, in "blonds of the European race", in a citation from 1833 Penny cyclopedia, which distinguishes genuine blondness as a Caucasian feature distinct from albinism.
By the early 1990s, "blonde moment" or being a "dumb blonde" had come into common parlance to mean "an instance of a person, esp. a woman... being foolish or scatter-brained." Another hair color word of French origin, brunet(te) (from the same Germanic root that gave "brown"), functions in the same way in orthodox English. The OED gives "brunet" as meaning "dark-complexioned" or a "dark-complexioned person", citing a comparative usage of brunet and blond to Thomas Henry Huxley in saying, "The present contrast of blonds and brunets existed among them." "Brunette" can be used, however, like "blonde", to describe a mixed-gender populace. The OED quotes Grant Allen, "The nation which resulted... being sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette."
"Blond" and "blonde" are also occasionally used to refer to objects that have a color reminiscent of fair hair. For example, the OED records its use in 19th-century poetic diction to describe flowers, "a variety of clay ironstone of the coal measures", "the colour of raw silk", a breed of ray, lager beer, and pale wood.
Maps Blond
Varieties
Various subcategories of blond hair have been defined to describe the different shades and sources of the hair color more accurately. Common examples include the following:
- ash-blond: ashen or grayish blond.
- bleached blond, bottle blond, or peroxide blond: terms used to refer to artificially colored blond hair.
- blond/flaxen: when distinguished from other varieties, "blond" by itself refers to a light but not whitish blond, with no traces of red, gold, or brown; this color is often described as "flaxen".
- dirty blond or dishwater blond: dark blond with flecks of golden blond and brown.
- golden blond: a darker to rich, golden-yellow blond (found mostly in Northeastern Europe, i.e., Russia, Estonia).
- honey blond: dark iridescent blond.
- platinum blond or towheaded: whitish-blond; almost all platinum blonds are children, although it is found on people in Northern Europe. "Platinum blond" is often used to describe bleached hair, while "towheaded" generally refers to natural hair color.
- sandy blond: grayish-hazel or cream-colored blond.
- strawberry blond or Venetian blond: reddish blond
- yellow: yellow-blond ("yellow" can also be used to refer to hair which has been dyed yellow).
Evolution of blond hair
Natural lighter hair colors occur most often in Europe and less frequently in other areas. In Northern European populations, the occurrence of blond hair is very frequent. The hair color gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe, giving the continent a wide range of hair and eye shades. Based on a genetic research carried out at three Japanese universities, the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair in Europe has been isolated to about 11,000 years ago during the last ice age.
A typical explanation found in the scientific literature for the evolution of light hair is related to the evolution of light skin, and in turn the requirement for vitamin D synthesis and northern Europe's seasonal less solar radiation. Lighter skin is due to a low concentration in pigmentation, thus allowing more sunlight to trigger the production of vitamin D. In this way, high frequencies of light hair in northern latitudes are a result of the light skin adaptation to lower levels of solar radiation, which reduces the prevalence of rickets caused by vitamin D deficiency. The darker pigmentation at higher latitudes in certain ethnic groups such as the Inuit is explained by a greater proportion of seafood in their diet and by the climate which they live in, because in the polar climate there is more ice or snow on the ground, and this reflects the solar radiation onto the skin, making this environment lack the conditions for the person to have blond, brown or red hair, light skin and blue, grey or green eyes.
An alternative hypothesis was presented by Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, who claims blond hair evolved very quickly in a specific area at the end of the last ice age by means of sexual selection. According to Frost, the appearance of blond hair and blue eyes in some northern European women made them stand out from their rivals, and more sexually appealing to men, at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.
Recent archaeological and genetic study published in 2014 found that seven "Scandinavian hunter-gatherers" found in the 7,700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, and that they had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and also contributes to lighter skin and blond hair. Genetic research published in 2014 and 2015 also indicates that Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans who migrated to Europe in the Bronze Age were overwhelmingly dark-eyed (brown), dark-haired and had a skin colour that was moderately light, though somewhat darker than that of the average modern European. Light pigmentation traits had already existed in pre-Indo-European Europeans (both farmers and hunter-gatherers), and long-standing philological attempts to correlate them with the arrival of Indo-Europeans from the steppes were misguided.
It is now hypothesized by researchers that blond hair evolved more than once. Published in May 2012 in Science, a study of people from the Solomon Islands in Melanesia found that an amino acid change in TYRP1 produced blonde hair.
Prevalence
Blond hair is most common in light-skinned infants and children, so much so that the term "baby blond" is often used for very light colored hair. Babies may be born with blond hair even among groups where adults rarely have blond hair, although such natural hair usually falls out quickly. Blond hair tends to turn darker with age, and many children's blond hair turns light, medium, dark brown or black before or during their adult years. Because blond hair tends to turn brunette with age, natural blond hair is rare in adulthood; according to the sociologist Christie Davies, only around five percent of adults in Europe and North America are naturally blond. A study conducted in 2003 concluded that only four percent of American adults are naturally blond. Nonetheless, a significant majority of Caucasian women (perhaps as high as three in four) dye their hair blond, a significantly higher percentage than for any other hair color.
Europe
Blond hair is most common in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea countries, where true blondism is believed to have originated. The pigmentation of both hair and eyes is lightest around the Baltic Sea, and darkness increases regularly and almost concentrically around this region.
In France, according to a source published 1939, blondism is more common in Normandy, and less common in the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean seacoast; 26% of French population has blond or light brown hair. A 2007 study of French females showed that by then roughly 20% were blonde, although half of these blondes were fully fake. Roughly ten percent of French females are natural blondes, of which 60% bleach their hair to a lighter nuance of blonde.
In Portugal, an average 11% of the population shows traces of blondism, peaking at 14.3-15.1% blondes in Póvoa de Varzim in northern Portugal. In northern Spain, 17% of the population shows traces of blondism, but in southern Spain just 2% of the people are blond. In Italy, a study of Italian men conducted by Ridolfo Livi between 1859 and 1863 on the records of the National Conscription Service showed that 8.2% of Italian men exhibited blond hair. Blondism frequency varies among regions from 12.6% in Veneto, to 1.7% in Sardinia. In a more detailed study from the 20th-century geneticist Renato Biasutti, the regional contrasts of blondism frequency are better shown, with a greater occurrence in the northern regions where the figure could be over 20%, and a lesser occurrence in the south such as Sardinia where the frequency was less than 2.4%. With the exception of Benevento and the surrounding area where various shades of blond hair were present in 10%-14.9% of the population, other southern regions averaged between 2.5% and 7.4%.
Africa
Blondism is a common sight among Berbers of North Africa, especially in the Rif and Kabyle region. Blondism frequency varies among Berbers from 1% among Jerban Berbers and 4% among Mozabite Berbers and Shawia Berbers, to 11% among Kabyle Berbers. In South Africa where there is a significant population of whites, mainly from Dutch and English ancestry, blondes may account for 3-4% of the South African population.
A number of blonde naturally mummified bodies of common people (i.e. not proper mummies) dating to Roman times have been found in the Fagg El Gamous cemetery in Egypt. "Of those whose hair was preserved 54% were blondes or redheads, and the percentage grows to 87% when light-brown hair color is added." Excavations have been ongoing since the 1980s. Burials seem to be clustered by hair-colour.
Oceania
Aboriginal Australians, especially in the west-central parts of the continent, have a high frequency of natural blond-to-brown hair. Blondness is also found in some other parts of the South Pacific, such as the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, again with higher incidences in children. Blond hair in Melanesians is caused by an amino acid change in the gene TYRP1. This mutation is at a frequency of 26% in the Solomon Islands and is absent outside of Oceania.
Asia
Blonde hair can be found in any region of Asia, including West Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia. In these parts of Asia blond hair is generally seen among children and usually turns into a shade of dark brown in adulthood. Environmental factors, for example sun exposure and nutrition status, often contribute to changes in hair color in Asia. Genetic research published in 2014, 2015 and 2016 found that Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans, who migrated to Europe in the early Bronze Age were overwhelmingly dark-eyed (brown) and dark-haired, and had a skin colour that was moderately light, though somewhat darker than that of the average modern European. While light pigmentation traits had already existed in pre-Indo-European Europeans (both farmers and hunter-gatherers), long-standing philological attempts to correlate them with the arrival of Indo-Europeans from the steppes were misguided.
According to genetic studies, Yamnaya Proto-Indo-European migration to Europe led to Corded Ware culture, where Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans mixed with "Scandinavian hunter-gatherer" women who carried genetic alleles HERC2/OCA2, which causes combination of blue eyes and blond hair. Proto-Indo-Iranians who split from Corded Ware culture formed the Andronovo culture and are believed to have spread genetic alleles HERC2/OCA2 that cause blonde hair to parts of West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. Genetic analysis in 2014 also found that people of the Afanasevo culture which flourished in the Altai Mountains were genetically identical to Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans and that they did not carry genetic alleles for blonde hair or light eyes. The Afanasevo culture was later replaced by a second wave of Indo-European invaders from the Andronovo culture, who were a product of Corded Ware admixture that took place in Europe, and carried genetic alleles that cause blond hair and light eyes. In 2009 and 2014, genomic study of Tarim mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang, China, showed that they were also a product of a Corded Ware admixture and were genetically closer to the Andronovo culture (which split from Corded Ware culture) than to the Yamnaya culture or Afanasevo culture.
Today, higher frequencies of light hair in Asia are more prevalent among Pamiris, Kalash, Nuristani and Uyghur children than in adult populations of these ethnic groups. About 75% of Russia is geographically considered North Asia; however, the Asian portion of Russia contributes to only an estimate of 20% of Russia's total population. North Asia's population has an estimate of 1-19% with light hair. From the times of the Russian Tsardom of the 17th century through the Soviet Union rule in the 20th century, many ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians were settled in or exiled en masse to Siberia and Central Asia. Blond hair is often seen in these groups, whereas the indigenous peoples are more likely to be dark haired. For instance, their descendants currently contribute to an estimated 25% of Kazakhstan's total population.
Americas
Many actors and actresses in Latin America and Hispanic United States have blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin.
Historical cultural perceptions
Ancient Greece
Most people in ancient Greece had dark hair and, as a result of this, the Greeks found blond hair immensely fascinating. In the Homeric epics, Menelaus the king of the Spartans is, together with some other Achaean leaders, portrayed as blond. Other blond characters in the Homeric poems are Peleus, Achilles, Meleager, Agamede, and Rhadamanthys. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was often described as golden-haired and portrayed with this color hair in art. Aphrodite's master epithet in the Homeric epics is ?????? (Khryse?), which means "golden". The traces of hair color on Greek korai probably reflect the colors the artists saw in natural hair; these colors include a broad diversity of shades of blond, red, and brown. The minority of statues with blond hair range from strawberry blond up to platinum blond.
Sappho of Lesbos (c. 630-570 BC) wrote that purple-colored wraps as headdress were good enough, except if the hair was blonde: "...for the girl who has hair that is yellower than a torch [it is better to decorate it] with wreaths of flowers in bloom." Sappho also praises Aphrodite for her golden hair, stating that since gold metal is free from rust, the goddess's golden hair represents her freedom from ritual pollution. Sappho's contemporary Alcman of Sparta praised golden hair as one of the most desirable qualities of a beautiful woman, describing in various poems "the girl with the yellow hair" and a girl "with the hair like purest gold."
In the fifth century BC, the sculptor Pheidias may have depicted the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena's hair using gold in his famous statue of Athena Parthenos, which was displayed inside the Parthenon. The Greeks thought of the Thracians who lived to the north as having reddish-blond hair. Because many Greek slaves were captured from Thrace, slaves were stereotyped as blond or red-headed. "Xanthias" (???????), meaning "reddish blond", was a common name for slaves in ancient Greece and a slave by this name appears in many of the comedies of Aristophanes.
The most famous statue of Aphrodite, the Aphrodite of Knidos, sculpted in the fourth century BC by Praxiteles, represented the goddess's hair using gold leaf and contributed to the popularity of the image of Aphrodite as a blonde goddess. Greek prostitutes frequently dyed their hair blond using saffron dyes or colored powders. Blond dye was highly expensive, took great effort to apply, and smelled repugnant, but none of these factors inhibited Greek prostitutes from dying their hair. As a result of this and the natural rarity of blond hair in the Mediterranean region, by the fourth century BC, blond hair was inextricably associated with prostitutes. The comic playwright Menander (c. 342/41 - c. 290 BC) protests that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow." At another point, he deplores blonde hair dye as dangerous: "What can we women do wise or brilliant, who sit with hair dyed yellow, outraging the character of gentlewomen, causing the overthrow of houses, the ruin of nuptials, and accusations on the part of children?" Historian and Egyptologist Joann Fletcher asserts that the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great and members of the Macedonian-Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Hellenistic Egypt had blond hair, such as Arsinoe II and Berenice II, while Cleopatra VII was likely a redhead given her appearance in a near-contemporary Roman painting from Herculaneum. Historian Michael Grant notes that Ptolemy II Philadelphus, pharaoh and husband to queen Arsinoe II, also had blonde hair.
Roman Empire
During the early years of the Roman Empire, blond hair was associated with prostitutes. The preference changed to bleaching the hair blond when Greek culture, which practiced bleaching, reached Rome, and was reinforced when the legions that conquered Gaul returned with blond slaves. Sherrow also states that Roman women tried to lighten their hair, but the substances often caused hair loss, so they resorted to wigs made from the captives' hair. According to Francis Owens, Roman literary records describe a large number of well-known Roman historical personalities as blond. In addition, 250 individuals are recorded to have had the name Flavius, meaning yellow, and there are various people named Rufus and Rutilius, meaning red haired and reddish-haired, respectively.
Juvenal wrote in a satirical poem that Messalina, Roman empress of noble birth, would hide her black hair with a blonde wig for her nightly visits to the brothel: sed nigrum flavo crinem abscondente galero intravit calidum veteri centone lupanar. In his Commentary on the Aeneid of Virgil, Maurus Servius Honoratus noted that the respectable matron was only black haired, never blonde. In the same passage, he mentioned that Cato the Elder wrote that some matrons would sprinkle golden dust on their hair to make it reddish-color. Emperor Lucius Verus (r. 161 - 169 AD) was said to sprinkle gold-dust on his already "golden" blond hair to make it even blonder and brighter. Commodus (r. 177-192), son of Marcus Aurelius (a co-emperor with Lucius Verus), likewise had naturally curly blond hair.
From an ethnic point of view, Roman authors associated blond and red hair with the Gauls and the Germans: e.g., Virgil describes the hair of the Gauls as "golden" (aurea caesaries), Tacitus wrote that "the Germans have fierce blue eyes, red-blond hair (rutilae comae), huge (tall) frames"; in accordance with Ammianus, almost all the Gauls were "of tall stature, fair and ruddy". Celtic and Germanic peoples of the provinces, among the free subjects called peregrini, served in Rome's armies as auxilia, such as the cavalry contingents in the army of Julius Caesar. Some became Roman citizens as far back as the 1st century BC, following a policy of Romanization of Gaul and Lesser Germania. For instance, Gaius Julius Civilis, a prince of the Batavii, was a Roman citizen either by birth or naturalization (as indicated by his name). Before the Constitutio Antoniniana, which granted citizenship to all free men of the empire in 212 AD, entire auxiliary cohorts were occasionally granted citizenship for their performance in battle. Sometimes entire Celtic and Germanic tribes were granted citizenship, such as when emperor Otho granted citizenship to all of the Lingones in 69 AD. By the 1st century BC, the Roman Republic had expanded its control into parts of western Germany, and by 85 AD the provinces of Germania Inferior and Germania Superior were formally established there. Yet as late as the 4th century AD, Ausonius, a poet and tutor from Burdigala, wrote a poem about an Alemanni slave girl named Bissula, who he had recently freed after she'd been taken as a prisoner of war in the campaigns of Valentinian I, noting that her adopted Latin language marked her as a woman of Latium yet her blond-haired, blue-eyed appearance ultimately signified her true origins from the Rhine.
Further south, the Iberian peninsula was originally inhabited by Celtiberians outside of Roman control. The gradual Roman conquest of Iberia was completed by the early 1st century AD. The Romans established provinces such as Hispania Terraconensis that were inhabited largely by Gallaeci, whose red and blond-haired descendants (which also include those of Visigothic origins) have continued to inhabit northern areas of Spain such as Galicia and Portugal into the modern era. During the medieval period Spanish ladies preferred to dye their hair black, yet by the time of the Renaissance in the 16th century the fashion (imported from Italy) was to dye their hair blond or red.
Medieval Europe
Medieval Scadinavian art and literature often places emphasis on the length and color of a woman's hair, considering long, blonde hair to be the ideal. In Norse mythology, the goddess Sif has famously blonde hair, which some scholars have identified as representing golden wheat. In the Old Norse Gunnlaug Saga, Helga the Beautiful, described as "the most beautiful woman in the world", is said to have hair that is "as fair as beaten gold" and so long that it can "envelope her entirely". In the Poetic Edda poem Rígsþula, the blond man Jarl is considered to be the ancestor of the dominant warrior class. In Northern European folklore, supernatural beings value blonde hair in humans. Blonde babies are more likely to be stolen and replaced with changelings, and young blonde women are more likely to be lured away to the land of the beings.
The Scandinavians were not the only ones to place strong emphasis on the beauty of blonde hair; the French writer Christine de Pisan writes in her book The Treasure of the City of Ladies (1404) that "there is nothing in the world lovelier on a woman's head than beautiful blond hair." In medieval artwork, female saints are often shown with long, shimmering blonde hair, which emphasizes their holiness and virginity. At the same time, however, Eve is often shown with long, blonde hair, which frames her nude body and draws attention to her sexual attractiveness. In medieval Gothic paintings of the crucifixion of Jesus, the figure of Mary Magdalene is shown with long, blond hair, which flows down her back unbound in contrast to most of the women in the scenes, who are shown with dark hair, normally covered by a scarf. In the older versions of the story of Tristan and Iseult, Tristan falls in love with Iseult after seeing only a single lock of her long, blonde hair. In fact, Iseult was so closely associated with blondness that, in the poems of Chrétien de Troyes, she is called "Iseult le Blonde". In Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (written from 1387 until 1400), the knight describes the beautiful princess Emily in his tale, stating, "yclothed was she fressh, for to devyse:/Hir yellow heer was broided in a tresse/Behinde hir bak, a yerde long, I gesse" (lines 1048-1050).
Because of blond hair's relative commonness in northern Europe, especially among children, folk tales from these regions tend to feature large numbers of blond protagonists. Although these stories may not have been seen by their original tellers as idealizing blond hair, when they are read in cultures outside of northern Europe where blond hair "has rarity value", they may seem to connote that blond hair is a sign of special purity.
Early twentieth-century racism
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blond hair, white skin, blue eyes, a tall stature, a long head, and an angled nose were deemed by scientific racists as hallmarks of the so-called "master race". In the nineteenth century, this race was usually referred to as the "Germanic race", but after the turn of the twentieth century, it came to be more commonly known as the "Nordic race". German and Scandinavian scientists and academics throughout the early part of the twentieth century studied racial typology to the point of obsession and debated the features of the Nordic race extensively.
In the 1920s, the eugenicist Eugen Fischer invented the Fischer hair color table (Fischer Haarfarbentafel) to scientifically document hair color, which consisted of twenty-six bundles of cellulose fiber coated in non-fading colors attached to a palette and labeled with numbers. Lighter colors were given higher numbers and darker ones were given lower numbers, with the distinction between "blond" and "brown" being set between seven and eight. Fischer was a passionate supporter of Nazi eugenics and warned that the interbreeding of different races would result in the deterioration of modern civilization. Dispute over the exact distinction between blond and brown hair was a heated debate among Norwegian anthropologists during this period, with Halfdan Bryn arguing that the distinction should instead be set between six and seven.
By the end of the 1920s, the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO), the leading international eugenics organization, became increasingly dominated by proponents of the racial hygiene movement, who sought to turn the organization into "Blond International", which would be "aimed at the purification and propagation of the Nordic race." After the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, racial anthropology based on the ideas of genetic superiority and racial psychology "became increasingly hegemonic in Germany." The Nazis revered blond hair as a quality of the herrenrasse ("master race").
The idea of racial superiority, which once dominated the field of anthropology, has now been completely and unanimously rejected by modern scientists. Modern scientists have also rejected the assertions and beliefs of pre-World War II racialists. Classification of race based on physical characteristics such as hair color is seen as a "flawed, pseudo-scientific relic of the past." Many modern scientists dispute whether the concept of "race" is even a useful classification for human beings at all.
Modern cultural stereotypes
Sexuality
In contemporary popular culture, blonde women are stereotyped as being more sexually attractive to men than women with other hair colors. For example, Anita Loos popularized this idea in her 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Some women have reported they feel other people expect them to be more fun-loving after having lightened their hair. The American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler offers an appraisal of the blonde as social criticism in his novel The Long Goodbye (1953):
There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial.
There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.
American novelist and short story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, and chronicler of the Jazz Age, describes a blonde salesclerk working in Minneapolis, Minnesota in his short story "At Your Age" (1929):
Then looking up, he saw the blonde girl. She was a rare blonde, even in the Promised Land of Scandinavians, where pretty blondes were not rare. There was a warm color in her cheeks, lips and pink little hands that folded the powders into papers; her hair, in long braids twisted about her head, was shining and alive. She seemed to Tom suddenly the cleanest person he knew of, and he caught his breath as he stepped forward and looked into her gray eyes.
- "A can of talcum."
- "What kind?"
- "Any kind...that's fine."
She looked back at him apparently without self-consciousness, [and] his heart raced with it wildly."
Madonna popularized the short bleached blond haircut after the release of her third studio album True Blue and influenced both the 1980s fashion scene as well as many future female musicians like Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus.
Lack of intelligence
Originating in Europe, the "blonde stereotype" is also associated with being less serious or less intelligent. Blonde jokes are a class of jokes based on the stereotype of blonde women as unintelligent. In Brazil, this extends to blonde women being looked down, as reflected in sexist jokes, as also sexually licentious. It is believed the originator of the "dumb blonde" was an eighteenth-century blonde French prostitute named Rosalie Duthé whose reputation of being beautiful but dumb inspired a play about her called Les Curiosites de la Foire (Paris 1775). Blonde actresses have contributed to this perception; some of them include Marilyn Monroe, Judy Holliday, Jayne Mansfield, and Goldie Hawn during her time at Laugh-In.
The British filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock preferred to cast blonde women for major roles in his films as he believed that the audience would suspect them the least, comparing them to "virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints", hence the term "Hitchcock blonde". This stereotype has become so ingrained it has spawned counter-narratives, such as in the 2001 film Legally Blonde in which Elle Woods, played by Reese Witherspoon, succeeds at Harvard despite biases against her beauty and blonde hair.
In the 1950s, the American actress Marilyn Monroe's screen persona centered on her blonde hair and the stereotypes associated with it, especially dumbness, naïveté, sexual availability and artificiality. She often used a breathy, childish voice in her films, and in interviews gave the impression that everything she said was "utterly innocent and uncalculated", parodying herself with double entendres that came to be known as "Monroeisms". For example, when she was asked what she had on in the 1949 nude photo shoot, she replied, "I had the radio on". Monroe often wore white to emphasize her blondness, and drew attention by wearing revealing outfits that showed off her figure. Although Monroe's typecast screen persona as a dim-witted but sexually attractive blonde was a carefully crafted act, audiences and film critics believed it to be her real personality and did not realize that she was only acting.
See also
- Science
- Disappearing blonde gene
- Human hair color
- Auburn hair
- Black hair
- Brown hair
- Red hair
- Society
- Blonde vs. brunette rivalry
- Blonde stereotype
- Ganguro
- Go Blonde Festival
References
Bibliography
External links
Source of article : Wikipedia
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