Blond.html



A portrait of three blond children (1724) by Denner Balthasar.

Blond (also spelled blonde, see below) 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, going from the very pale blond caused by a patchy, scarce distribution of pigment, to reddish "strawberry" blond colors or golden brownish blond colors, the latter with more eumelanin.

Etymology, spelling, and grammar

"Portrait of a lady in yellow" (1470) by Alesso Baldovinetti.

The word blonde was first attested in English in 1481 and derives from Old French blont and meant "a colour midway between golden and light chestnut". It largely replaced the native term fair, from Old English fæger. The French (and thus also the English) word blond has two possible origins. Some linguists say it comes from Middle 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. Also, Old English beblonden meant dyed as ancient Germanic warriors were noted for dyeing their hair. However, other linguists who desire a Latin origin for the word say that Middle 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, hence blonde for females/noun and blond for males/adjective.^[1]

Writers of English often will still distinguish between the masculine blond and the feminine blonde^[2] and, as such, it is one of the few adjectives in English with separate masculine and feminine forms. However, many writers use only one of the spellings without regard to gender, and without a clear majority usage one way or another. The word is also often used as a noun to refer to a woman with blond hair, but some speakers see this usage as sexist^[2] and reject it. (Another hair color word of French origin, brunet(te), also functions in the same way in orthodox English.)

The word is also occasionally used, with either spelling, to refer to objects that have a color reminiscent of fair hair. Examples include pale wood and lager beer.

Sub-categories

Platinum blond hair on an adult.

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Many sub-categories of blond hair have also been invented to describe someone with blond hair more accurately. Examples include the following:

• Platinum blond - Pale blond, nearly white; found naturally almost exclusively in children, but occurring rarely among some adults
• Ash blond - usually quite fair, with some ashen (gray) tones
• Sunny blond - Very bright, ranging from almost yellow to light yellow.
• Sandy blond - similar to sand in color
• Golden blond - lighter, with a gold cast
• Strawberry blond - reddish blond
• Bleached blond - hair made blond artificially by bleaching
• Zebra blond - streaked blond and brunette
• Dirty blond - a variety of hair color that mixes lighter blonde with some darker browns giving a dark blonde appearance.
• Golden brown - darkest shade of blond which sometimes looks light brown and other times dark blond.
• Pool blond - Blond tinted with green due to exposure to copper in swimming pools. There are many terms for this form of blond.
• Honey Blond- Blond with a honey-colored tint. It can be dark blond or light blond.

Origins

"Heathland Princess" (1889) by Fritz von Uhde.

Lighter hair colors occur naturally in Europeans, and less frequently in other ethnicities^[3]. In certain European populations, the occurrence of blond hair is very frequent. The hair color gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe and the continent has an unusually wide range of hair and eye shades. Based on recent genetic information 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. Before then, Europeans mostly had darker hair and eyes, which is predominant in the rest of the world.^[3]

There is no consensus, but many theories, as to why certain populations in Europe had a high incidences of blond hair. Some say that if the changes had occurred by natural selection, they would have taken about 850,000 years, but modern humans, emigrating from Africa, reached Europe only 35,000-40,000 years ago.^[3]

Other theories suggest a different form of selection: that early men simply found blond hair more attractive.^[4] Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, under the aegis of University of St Andrews, published a study in March 2006 in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior that says blond hair evolved very quickly at the end of the last Ice Age by means of sexual selection.^[5] According to the study, the appearance of blond hair and blue eyes in some northern European women made them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for males made scarce due to long, arduous hunting trips; this hypothesis argues that women with blond hair posed an alternative that helped them mate and thus increased the number of blonds.

Another reason men may have preferred blonde women is that light hair color is a marker of youth - since many Caucasian children have blond hair but it darkens as they mature, blonde girls or women would appear younger and therefore, more fertile.

A theory propounded in The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994), says blond hair became predominant in Europe in about 3000 BC, in the area now known as Lithuania, among the recently arrived Proto-Indo-European settlers, and the trait spread quickly through sexual selection into Scandinavia. As above, the theory assumes that men found women with blond hair more attractive.^[6]

In 2002, the Disappearing blonde gene hoax cited WHO as the source of a "scientific study" predicting blonds were eventually going to become extinct.

Geographic distribution

Light hair map of modern Europe and surroundings. Yellow: >80%, light orange: 50-79%, light brown: 20-49%, dark brown: 1-19%.

Blonde hair is at the highest frequency among the indigenous peoples of Northern and Central Europe. Even though mostly associated with Scandinavia, mostly Sweden, a large amount of Swedes are not blond, as with the rest of Scandinavia. Blonde people are also found in relatively large numbers in northern Germany, eastern England, northern and eastern parts of France, Poland, the Baltic States and northern parts of European Russia. Due to vast movements of peoples from the 16th to the 20th centuries, large number of blond people are also found in the Americas and Oceania.

In the Americas, blond people are mostly found in the United States, Canada, southern Brazil, Argentina and southern Chile due to English and German immigration.

In Oceania, blond Europeans are to be found in Australia and New Zealand due to English immigration.

Generally, blond hair in Europeans is associated with paler eye color (gray, blue, green and light brown) and pale (sometimes freckled) skin tone. Strong sunlight also lightens hair of any pigmentation^{citation needed}, to varying degrees, and causes many blond people to freckle, especially during childhood.^{citation needed}

Blond Pacific Islander Boy^[7]

In Caucasus there are a high frequency of blonds, mostly to be found in Georgia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan and Armenia^who?. In Central and South Asia it is still found in higher frequency among some populations, particularly among the northern populations of Pakistan (Kalash, Hunza, Pakhtun, Kashmiri and rarely in Baloch) and the Nuristani people of Afghanistan (up to one third of the Nuristani).^[8]

The Iranians and their related groups have a higher frequency of blonds than other ethnic groups of the Middle East, mostly in the Northern parts of Iran. In western Asia blonds are mostly found in israel and Western Turkey(due to European admixture), Western Syria, Lebanon .

In North Africa, blonds are found in Morocco, Tunisia and northern Algeria among the Berbers.

Aboriginal Australians, especially in the west-central parts of the continent, also have a fairly high instance of natural blond-to-brown hair,^[9][10] with as many as 90-100% of children having blond hair in some areas.^[11] The trait among Indigenous Australians is primarily associated with children and women and the hair turns more often to a darker brown color, rather than black, as they age.^[11] Blondness is also found in some other parts of the South Pacific such as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Again there are higher incidences in children but here many adults too carry this indigenous blond mutation.

Some Guanches populations, particularly the now extinct aboriginal population of Tenerife, one of the Canary islands of the African Atlantic coast, were said by 14th century Spanish explorers to exhibit blond hair and blue eyes.^[12][13] Blondness was also reported among South American Indians.^{citation needed}

Relation to age and distribution on body

Blond hair is common in Caucasian 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,^[14] although such natal hair usually falls out quickly. Blond hair tends to turn darker with age, and many children born blond turn light, medium, or dark brunette before or during their teenage years.

True blonds often have platinum blond hair as children, pale skin with little pigment, pale eye-lashes and gray eyes. If their hair darkens with age it tends to turn a darker ash-blond, not the rich brown of a brunette. Eyelashes and eyebrows remain fair. (Eyelash color is probably the best marker for prediction of adult hair color.)^{citation needed}

Those who turn brunette as teens usually have more pigment to begin with; a slightly golden skin tone that tans a little more easily than the paler skin of true blonds, often (but not always) a richer, more golden-blond hair color, dark eye-lashes and bright blue, green, hazel or brown eyes.^{citation needed}

The body hair of blonds is also blond, although terminal hair elsewhere on the body may be darker than hair on the head, and even brown. Facial hair is often reddish. Vellus, on the other hand, may be very light or even transparent. Hair that grows from a mole or from a birthmark may be dark.^{citation needed}

Culturally related ideas

A depiction of the god Loki cutting the goddess Sif's famously golden locks (1920) by Willy Pogany.

In Norse mythology, both the goddess Sif^[15] (wife of Thor) and the major goddess Freyja^[16] are described as blonde. In the Poetic Edda poem Rígsþula, the blond man Jarl was considered to be the ancestor of the dominant warrior class. In Northern Europe folklore, fairies value blond hair in humans. Blond 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 fairies.^[17]

In European fairy tales, blond hair was commonly ascribed to the heroes and heroines. This may occur in the text, as in Madame d'Aulnoy's La Belle aux cheveux d'or or The Beauty with Golden Hair, or in illustrations depicting the scenes.^[18] One notable exception is Snow White who, because of her mother's wish for a child "as red as blood, as white as snow, as black as ebony," has dark hair.^[19] This tendency appears also in more formal literature; in Milton's poem Paradise Lost the noble and innocent Adam and Eve have "golden tresses"^[20], while near the end of J. R. R. Tolkien's work The Lord of the Rings, the especially favourable year following the War of the Ring was signified in the Shire by an exceptional number of blond-haired children.

Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

In the early-mid twentieth century, Nordicists such as Madison Grant and Alfred Rosenberg associated blond hair with a Nordic race, which they distinguished from a larger Aryan race that included what they called the non-blond Alpine race. During World War II, blond hair was one of the traits used by Nazis to select Slavic children for Germanization.

In contemporary popular culture, it is often stereotyped that men find blonde women more attractive than women with other hair colors. Alfred Hitchcock preferred to cast blonde women for major roles in his films as he believed that the audience would suspect them the least, hence the term "Hitchcock blonde"^[21]. Blonde jokes are a class of derogatory jokes based on a "dumb blonde" stereotype of blonde women being unintelligent, sexually promiscuous, or both. In other parts of modern culture, blonde women are often portrayed as "promiscuous", leading to the stereotype that blondes "have more fun." Jean Harlow (a natural ash blonde) and Marilyn Monroe (pale blond as a child though her hair darkened to auburn) were notable bleached blonde sex icons of twentieth-century America, frequently portraying stereotypical dumb blondes in their films.

References

See also

• Disappearing blonde gene
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Blond hair

• Why Does the Pool Turn Blonde Hair Green?