In this chunky book, Joanna Pitman tells us something we already suspect to be true, and she does it beautifully. We are, she says, obsessed with blonde hair. For instance, even though only one in 20 of us is naturally blonde, a third of women lighten their hair. Why? Because blonde hair gets you more attention. Blonde hair is a magnet for sex and money. When she bleached her own hair, Pitman tells us, the change was dramatic. People stared. ‘The way they looked,’ she says, ‘it felt as if my head was radiating some kind of spectral glow.’ As a blonde, she got ‘preferential treatment’. Men gave her ‘wolfish looks’. ‘I wondered,’ she says, ‘whether I could afford not to be blonde.’
Pitman takes us on a blonde history of the world. It is a history of sex and subterfuge, of prejudice and fantasy – the best kind of history. People, she tells us, have been obsessed with blondes since the Greeks lusted after Aphrodite, the golden-haired goddess of ‘love in all its forms’. So did the Romans, who changed her name to Venus. Pliny tells us of one man driven so wild that he defiled the famous statue of Aphrodite at Knidos; he ’embraced it intimately; a stain bears witness to his lust’. Meanwhile, in order to go blonde, ancient women spent hours dipping their hair in all sorts of unpleasant, smelly things, much as they do now. Rich Roman women who employed specialist hairdressers, stabbed them with pins when they got the tint wrong.
Clerics in the Middle Ages feared blondes, and no doubt went mad with desire thinking about them, too. When, in puritanical times, Eve took a dip in the ratings, people began to portray her as a blonde: Eve the seducer, the hussy. (Centuries later, she was played in this spirit by Mae West, who said, ‘Would you, honey, like to try this apple?’) Monks and preachers went around telling people that blonde hair was the Devil’s work, which only made mediaeval women dip their heads in lye, saffron, turmeric and St John’s wort, among other things. And after going to all this trouble, of course, they didn’t want to put their heads in a wimple.
As a woman, Pitman shows us, being blonde can do you a power of good. Before Madonna went blonde, she typically sold five million copies of every album. Afterwards – 20 million. Before Norma Jean went blonde, she was just Norma Jean. Afterwards – Marilyn. Before Diana went blonde, she was a shy, mousy princess. Afterwards, she was a much less shy and mousy princess. And when Margaret Thatcher dyed her hair and did it up in that funny style, ‘it was a way of signalling the unassailability, longevity and immutability of her reign’.
But there has always been something about blonde hair which brings out the dark side of human nature. Perhaps that’s the attraction. Blonde hair smacks of the contrived, the unnatural – and the pure. Just look at the men who have been in thrall to it – Caligula, Nero, Hitler, Hitchcock. Women reading this book will want to go blonde; men reading it will hanker after blonde women. But the book has a powerful subtext: be careful.
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