By Bo Emerson
Cox News Service
ATLANTA — Membership in Club Blond has its privileges.
For 6-foot-plus Natalia Ilyin, one of those privileges included having a total stranger in a Brooks Brothers suit drop to his knees and wail, “Oh, baby, just give me one chance.”
That was nice, says the honey-topped college professor, but not so out of the ordinary. “People routinely smile at me on the street for no reason,” she writes in her memoir/cultural critique “Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture.”
It’s the golden rule. The chicks with the golden hair rule.
According to a new study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, that rule has been in force since blond was born.
The light-hair mutation appeared among our uniformly dark-haired European ancestors around 11,000 years ago, then spread rapidly in northern Europe, according to author Peter Frost.
“Blonds benefit from a novelty effect,” says Frost, via e-mail. “In other words, blonds have more fun because blond hair is relatively rare.”
Natural blonds represent only about 16 percent of the population, and amber waves of mane continue to fascinate. From Lillian Gish to blond-of-the-minute Jessica Simpson, women fly the flaxen flag and men surrender. Or so the story goes.
“It’s more of a myth, of you getting preferential treatment,” says green-eyed, natural blond Meagan Maron, 23, a recent graduate of the University of Alabama. “But I feel at the end of the day I’m just treated like everyone else.”
Clearly, not everyone feels that way. And the folks at Clairol understand that.In a recent study by the hair-coloring giant, blonds were considered the “most glamorous” by 65 percent of 2,400 respondents.
“Every girl at some point thinks of being a blond,” says Clairol spokeswoman Francine Gingras. “Some follow through with that dream.”
Clairol began stoking the dream machinery 50 years ago with one of the best-known ad campaigns of all time, anchored by the provocative slogan “Does she, or doesn’t she?”
Created by brassy, bottle-blond Shirley Polykoff, the ads made sales explode. In 1956 only 7 percent of American women colored their hair; within a few years the figure jumped to more than 50 percent, where it remains today.
What are they seeking? Heavenly status? “Blonde Like Me” author Ilyin points out that the blond archetype is as old as the myth of Isis, and that the dark-haired Greeks depicted Aphrodite, goddess of love, with golden hair. “That’s where we got the halo idea, sort of.”
But between the goddess of ancient Greece and the Madonna of the ICBM-shaped brassiere, the identity of the blond has gone through many twists and turns. She was the paragon of feminine virtue and beauty until the 19th Century, when a radical shift began, propelled by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and their female colleagues, according to Ellen Tremper, author of “I’m No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction and Film.”
“They made the blonds the secondary characters in these books,” she says. “The dark-haired woman is the heroine.”
Significantly, they also made blonds disagreeable. The transformation continued in movies of the 1930s, when female leads such as Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard added physical comedy and frankly sexual appetites to the previously immobile and untouchable blond archetype.
If it sounds like the blond was steadily changing into a human being, that’s exactly Tremper’s point.
But continued reverence for champagne tresses indicates the blond still has a toehold on that exalted throne.
A measure of Western blond-worship is the recurring “disappearing blond” myth that has circulated with regularity over the last 150 years. Reported by a credulous BBC in 2002, the story goes that the last real blond will be born in Finland sometime 200 years from n
May 12th, 2006
Roger Dobson and Abul Taher
THE modern gentleman may prefer blondes. But new research has found that it was cavemen who were the first to be lured by flaxen locks.
According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.
The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.
Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.
“Human hair and eye colour are unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe (and their) origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicates some kind of selection,” says the study by Peter Frost, a Canadian anthropologist. Frost adds that the high death rate among male hunters “increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of colour traits.”
Frost’s theory, to be published this week in Evolution and Human Behavior, the academic journal, was supported by Professor John Manning, a specialist in evolutionary psychology at the University of Central Lancashire. “Hair and eye colour tend to be uniform in many parts of the world, but in Europe there is a welter of variants,” he said. “The mate choice explanation now being put forward is, in my mind, close to being correct.”
Frost’s theory is also backed up by a separate scientific analysis of north European genes carried out at three Japanese universities, which has isolated the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair to about 11,000 years ago.
The hair colour gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe and the continent has an unusually wide range of hair and eye shades. In the rest of the world, dark hair and eyes are overwhelmingly dominant.
Just how such variety emerged over such a short period of time in one part of the world has long been a mystery. According to the new research, if the changes had occurred by the usual processes of evolution, they would have taken about 850,000 years. But modern humans, emigrating from Africa, reached Europe only 35,000-40,000 years ago.
Instead, Frost attributes the rapid evolution to how they gathered food. In Africa there was less dependence on animals and women were able to collect fruit for themselves. In Europe, by contrast, food gathering was almost exclusively a male hunter’s preserve. The retreating ice sheets left behind a landscape of fertile soil with plenty of grass and moss for herbivorous animals to eat, but few plants edible for humans. Women therefore took on jobs such as building shelters and making clothes while the men went on hunting trips, where the death rate was high.
The increase in competition for males led to rapid change as women struggled to evolve the most alluring qualities. Frost believes his theory is supported by studies which show blonde hair is an indicator for high oestrogen levels in women.
Jilly Cooper, 69, the author, described how in her blonde youth she had “certainly got more glances. I remember when I went to Majorca when I was 20, my bum was sore from getting pinched”.
However, Jodie Kidd, 27, the blonde model, disagrees with the theory: “I don’t think being blonde makes you more ripe for sexual activity. It’s much more to do with personality than what you look like. Beauty is much deeper than the colour of your hair.”
Film star blondes such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Stone and Scarlett Johansson are held up as ideals of feminine allure. However, the future of the blonde is uncertain.
Correction: The World Health Organisation has asked us to remove an earlier erroneous reference suggesting it had conducted a study which forecast natural blonds were likely to be extinct within 200 years. The WHO issued a formal denial of such a study in 2002. Click here for the WHO statement.
May 12th, 2006