DO BLONDES HAVE MORE FUN?

Posted by Sheila Connolly

At Boucheron recently I was hanging out with a terrific group of women who all write in the same genre, traditional mysteries.  (You know who you are!)  In fact, many of us write for the same publisher.  All are talented, interesting people.  And I realized that most of them are blonde.

When you know people primarily on-line, through their blogs or through writers lists, you don't think much about appearance.  We do share a lot of personal information:  I could probably tell you which ones are married, which have children, which are still working at day jobs.  I could even tell you how many pets they have and what kind(s), or their favorite foods.  But until you meet them at a conference, you have no idea what they look like.

Well, this batch was blonde.  Guess what:  I'm not blonde.  I felt like a goose in a swan convention.  A "herd" of swans?  (Hey, it sounds wrong, but I looked it up.)  There are probably pictures to prove it.

Why did I notice this?  A few million years ago, when I was an art history major in college, I wrote a senior thesis about Victorian Genre Painting.  In case you're unfamiliar with that (believe me, most people are), it was a style of painting that became popular when the middle classes in the later nineteenth century found they had some disposable income and started buying art, mainly as wall decoration.  Quite a few of these pictures included the very people who were buying them:  the English bourgeoisie.  (Gee, kinda like cozies, eh?)  The characters depicted were affluent members of the class, often seen in comfortable home environments.  At the same time there was a "story-telling" element, and quite often a moral message.

My particular focus in the thesis was how Victorian painters depicted women in that era (I wrote this during the height of the feminist wave).  The overall theme was "home=good".  Women were represented as the keepers of the hearth, helpmeets, and mothers.  And to emphasize this, there was the antithesis of this image:  the fallen woman.

The picture that best sums this up was painted by one Arthur D. Lemon, titled "Pure Innocence/Pure in No Sense."  It was a dual picture.  On one side was a charming child at play; on the other, a prostitute.  And both were blonde. (I'd love to show it to you, but it's so obscure that it doesn't appear anywhere on-line.)

Blonde or fair hair is often associated with childhood.  In addition, it is (if I recall my college biology classes correctly) also the result of recessive genes, so a "true" blonde is a relatively rare phenomenon, unless you happen to find yourself in Scandinavia.  So if a woman chooses to lighten her hair color, she is doing it (a) to invoke in others pleasant associations with early childhood, or (b) to stand out in a crowd (think Marilyn Monroe).  According to my in-depth research (i.e., I googled it), commercial hair bleach first emerged in a major way in the 1880s-90s, which corresponds to the period of Lemon's picture.  I would guess his lady of the evening wanted to be noticed.

Of course, hair color today runs the gamut from natural shades to neon, so a blonde hue is pretty mainstream.  And then there's the age factor:  many of us are "of a certain age," as the French would say. (TheFreeDictionary tells me that means a woman who "is no longer young but is not yet old."  Unfortunately, with ageing comes grey hair. We live in a youth-oriented culture, and nobody wants to be branded as "old," even if they're only forty. 

Take a poll among any group of women:  how many are sporting their own natural hair color?  Not many, I'd bet.  I plead guilty, and my grandmother went to her grave at 94 with dyed hair.  My mother dyed her hair; my sister dyes hers.  I resisted for as long as I could and finally gave in when I felt like I was fading into the wallpaper.

But I didn't go blonde, because it would look entirely fake on me.  Instead I opted for a tribute to my Irish forbears and chose a warm brown with reddish highlights (let's ignore the fact that the only Irish family members I knew had dark or sandy hair–not a redhead in the batch). At least I don't look blah and washed-out.

So to come back to my original question:  why are so many cozy writers blonde?  We want to look younger than our chronological age?  I don't think that applies. For one thing, many of us think that we're better writers now than we would have been twenty years ago, so we don't need to go back.  Besides, our readers don't look at author photos when they buy our books.  Is it because we want to stand out from the crowd?  I'm happier with that idea.  Maybe the blondes are saying, look at me!  I'm smart, I'm articulate, and I like what I'm doing.  It's a great group to hang out with–even if you're not blonde.

 

Comments

[Pamela]

Being born a blonde (and continuing to stay that way thanks to ..... in a bottle) and I can say is as my hair darkens, so does my mood. Don't know why. I just feel lighter, happier being a blonde. Maybe it is because blondes stand out more. But then I wonder about being a red head if I ever quite being a blonde. What does that say?

[Ruth McCarty]

Having been born blonde, I too find my mood darkens as my hair does. I just don't feel like myself and so I've been dying it since I was 15. And being blonde has crazy perks, like people letting you cut into traffic. I do wonder about the cozy connection though...

[Mary Jane Maffini]

Well ladies, as a recovering redhead (subject to change on a whim) who has gone prematurely blonde, let me say it's all fun. Sheila, with all that Irish in you, you don't need to be blonde to have fun! I am a witness ...

[Kate Flora]

Well, what I've found...being a dull blonde who happily takes assistance from her colorist...is that lots of long blonde hair makes people think I'm younger than I am...but it also makes people assume I'm dumb.

I once had someone blurt out...why, you're so much smarter than you look.