The Colour Blonde

As a little girl, there were three things I wanted above all else. A big house with an attic full of play equipment, a rabbit with the ability to navigate obstacle courses and a long, thick mane of blonde hair.

By the time I lived in a house with an attic I was long over play equipment and my interest in rabbits died way before that, but the one thing that didn't change was my fascination with blondeness.

Paula Yates once said she went blonde at the age of 12 to channel the madness, sexuality and drama of a Tennessee Williams heroine. I went blonde for the first time at 16, when the voice of Deborah Harry, purring the merits of a “luminous day-glo shade”, aroused my curiosity to the point that I couldn’t stand not being blonde any longer.

Unlike Yates, I didn't lighten my hair to enhance my inner vamp. To me, brunette had always seemed the more glamorous hue and I had always felt like more like a girl-next-door Betty than a vampy Veronica. I became blonde as a way of accessing the innocence and elusiveness of the flaxen-haired teens who flittered across my TV screen. I wasn’t trying to be Jean Harlow - I wanted to be Cher in Clueless, Buffy in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, or Sabrina in Sabrina, The Teenage Witch. A sunny blonde rather than a bombshell.

It sounds a bit mad on paper, but whether you look at Paula Yates, Madonna or Marilyn Monroe, blondeness is almost always about “becoming” one thing or another. While one-third of white women have blonde hair, only one in 20 doesn't rely on chemical assistance to keep it that way. The others are blonde by choice.

But why make that choice when it means shelling out $200 plus every time you visit the hairdresser, when the same chemicals that lighten your hair also destroy it over the time? Jean Harlow, Hollywood's original blonde bombshell, was forced to wear a wig after years of peroxide destroyed hers beyond repair and Dolly Parton’s been wearing one for years.

Alyson Schoer, owner of Sydney salon Blondes Brunettes Redheads, says it’s all about the glamour. “Seventy per cent of the salon’s clients request blonde hair and a lot of it has to do with Hollywood,” she says. “It’s very celebrity driven and I think it can mean a number of different things – there’s that whole glamorous Paris Hilton, money thing, but there’s also a more relaxed side to it as well with your Kate Hudsons and Cameron Diazs.”

And that’s not all there is to it. In her book Blonde Like Me, Natalia Ilyin runs through an entire catalogue of blondes: Sun Blondes (warm, maternal, succulent), Apollo Blondes (unattainable, goddess-like), Moon Blondes (cool, controlled), Ironic Blondes (sassy, self-aware) and Innocent Blondes (sweet, childlike). Then there are dumb blondes, brassy blondes, raunchy blondes, and sex-kitten blondes.

But it’s more than vanity – it’s about myth, meaning and self-expression. And according to Laini Burton, a researcher at Griffith University and author of The Blonde Paradox, it’s worth paying attention to. “Hair as a signifier is incredibly powerful and it says a lot about a person,” she says. “People say a lot through hair – a hairstyle or colour can tell you a lot about someone’s cultural affiliations.”

Ever since the ancient Romans started expanding north in around 750 BC, blondeness has variously been seen as a signifier of sweetness, charm, youth and sexual availability. These days, if Hollywood is any indication, we think of redheads as quirky, funny and sexy, brunettes as sultry, sophisticated and intelligent, and blondes – well, we still think of blondes as that muddle of contradictions. Sexy but non-threatening, sunny but also dangerous, tarty but still the perfect trophy wife. Blonde is also distinctly feminine – for all the hype over Brad Pitt, the perfect man is still tall, dark and handsome.

Like Schoer, Burton believes women go blonde for a variety of reasons. “It depends on the age and the cultural background of a person. When I was doing research and accosting people in the street, I’d often find that older women were interested in the way it made them feel more youthful. They said it seemed to soften the lines in the face, that it brightened them a bit. Others associated blonde hair with fun and happiness and said it made them feel sexier or lighter.”

For me, that first trip to the hairdresser only enhanced my love affair with blondeness. As a blonde, I suddenly felt prettier and shinier and more desirable. Like many a bottle blonde before me, I found that people – and not just men – started responding to me more warmly, that strangers smiled at me as I walked by. As another recent blonde convert boldly put it, “It’s like this reverence. It’s like you’re walking down the street and you grace the world with your blonde presence.”

Well, not quite, but there was something magical about it. And not something entirely imagined. John Armstrong, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, says that blondes occupy a special place in “the currency of male insecurity” – and dyed blondes more so than natural ones.

“There's a special category for the dyed blonde,” he says. “Natural blondeness is a gift from God – it doesn't prove you are a good person. The dyed blonde is making an effort, she’s putting in the hard yards to please, and this is very touching and noble. A lot of guys are especially attracted to the non-natural blonde (look at the Australian cricket team for starters). Dyed hair is like a miniskirt. 'I wasn’t born in a miniskirt, but look, I've got one on.' God-blondes tend to be angelic rather than dirty. Dirty dressed respectably is the ideal for a lot of men.”

But if colouring my hair blonde was like putting on a miniskirt, what would happen if I changed back into jeans? As the years went by, that initial magic became a kind of dependence. If blonde had the ability to make me feel pretty and shiny and desired, would not being blonde make me less attractive, less appealing, less desirable? I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.

I did find out, though, when a mix of curiosity, a dwindling bank balance and seemingly perpetually fading colour drove me to return to the brown hair I hadn’t sported since I was an awkward adolescent. And in doing so, I discovered that the blonde myth isn’t just a myth in the sense that it’s grounded in stories and cultural ideals, but that it's simply not true.

It seems my fears were unfounded. People aren’t less friendly, salespeople don’t treat me any differently and, if anything, I feel more comfortable with myself, knowing that whatever beauty I have isn’t dependent on a hair colour that screams “look at me!” My boyfriend professes that while he fell for me as a blonde, he prefers me as a brunette – and hopefully not just because he’s afraid of what I might do if he didn’t say that. On the flip side, I don’t feel any more sultry, sophisticated or intelligent than I did with lighter hair. I just feel like, well, me.

That’s not to say that the sense of transformation many women feel when they change their hair colour isn’t real. But it does suggest that it has less to do with the differences in how people react to us and more to do with our expectations and with what’s happening inside our heads.

Becoming your natural colour again is being able to accept who you are rather than what you think your flaxen locks have allowed you to become. You can still have the perceived “blonde attributes” as a brunette – sexy, friendly, fun, approachable – you’re just going to have to walk the talk.

As Armstrong says, “In reality, being blonde has little to do with having a good life. The qualities that make for a good life are courage, patience, imagination, commonsense, generosity of spirit, intelligence and self-control. Being blonde doesn't help or hinder any of these.” Amen to that.

Belinda Jeffrey, a renowned colour specialist who has tended to the golden locks of Naomi Watts, Sarah O’Hare, Kate Bosworth, Sarah Michelle Gellar and other famous blondes, says 80 per cent of her blonde clientele that turn to the dark side begin the long and arduous process of bleaching it back. It seems that being blonde is an addiction after all.

Published in Russh, May/June 2006.