Miranda Sawyer: A personal history of blonde ambition

Why do so many of us want to be blonde? On the eve of two exhibitions devoted to the fair, Miranda Sawyer ('natural ash') considers life as a slave to the peroxide bottle

Two exhibitions open in London next week – British Blondes at the National Portrait Gallery, and Blondes Have More Fun at the Getty Images Gallery – to coincide with the publication of On Blondes, Joanna Pitman's celebration of the species. Despite all this, there is, of course, no real reason to group people together according to hair hue: you may as well categorise them by the colour of their front door. Blondes are rarely natural, after all. But, these days, even art is about ratings, and an exhibition devoted to blondes promises more excitement than one about dried paint. It promises sex.

The word "blonde", even today, means a woman who's up for it: so much so that she'll dye her hair to advertise the fact. Yes, a blonde has made the effort to be pretty, which men – and women – appreciate. She's like a little angel, she shines like a beacon in the dark. Especially if she hasn't left the peroxide on long enough: she'll radiate like a Belisha. If she's natural, so much the better: natural blondes are genuine freaks in a world where the predominant hair colour – right across South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East – is black.

Do blondes have anything in common? Non-natural ones do. We know that much of life is easier being blonde: people are chattier with you because you appear unthreatening; they're kinder to you because – research proves! – blondes are shyer and they forget that you got your cherubic curls from a bottle rather than from God. And, as I said before, modern life is about ratings, about being liked by the largest amount of people. Blondes have always known how to play that card, how to do sexy, friendly, vulnerable, amenable. Blondes are fake, but don't think we don't know. As Dolly Parton says: "I don't care if they call me a dumb blonde, because I ain't dumb and I ain't blonde."

Here follows all the blonde facts my dear little blonde head could cope with:

Blondes Have more Fun

In fact, we insist on having more fun. This is because we know what tedium is, having spent vast chunks of our lives talking holidays to a bored teenager who takes an afternoon to coat our heads in blue gunk and wrap it in pieces of tinfoil. Sit through that every six weeks and you'd be desperate for a laugh, too. Still, today's highlighting methods are a gambol through a Timotei forest compared with the eye-watering technique of the Eighties. Nurse, the instruments. One stained, rubber swimming-hat, with teeny holes scattered on its surface; one hook; one sadist stylist who yanks your crowning glory in clumps through said holes with said hook. Then applies bleach, covers your head with a plastic bag, and takes the rest of the day off. You can weep if you want, they'll just think it's the fumes.

Blondes Have more Fun (2)

All hail Rod Stewart, the world's cheeriest bottle-blonde. One minute a cool-barneted soul singer with Mod credentials, the next a big-bottomed berk in leopard-skin leggings – never has peroxide been used to such devastating effect. Still, Rod might have lost his credibility along with his natural hue, but does he give a fig? No. He's too busy doing the fun thing, swishing about with other, female blonde-lings, who reflect his unnatural light back at him to create a Rod-surrounding nuclear glow. This also happens in areas of California, where everyone is blonde, but there they call it an aura.

Sun-in

And/or Domestos. The teenager's second station on the journey to blonde. Having moved on from squirting Jif lemon juice on to your mousy locks and sitting outside the shopping precinct in the thin spring sun, the next step is bleach. Sun-in is spray-in, watered-down peroxide; Domestos is used to scour toilets. Sun-in makes your hair orange, even if you turn the hairdryer on it; Domestos does exactly what it says on the bottle. A girl in my class sat with her fringe in a bucket of Domestos for an hour in an effort to turn David Sylvian platinum. When she moved her head back, her fringe stayed in the bucket. What's the betting Zoë Ball started this way?

John Frieda

A clever man, who took the Jif and Sun-in "formulas" (but ignored the Domestos: told you he was clever) and transformed them into the unrecognisably classier commodities Lemon Lights and Sun Streaks. Lemon Lights contains lemon juice, Sun Streaks is a "heat-accelerated highlighter": ah, how things move on. They are just two of umpteen haircare products that whizzy John Frieda makes specifically for blondes. Some aren't much cop, but others – specifically, the Funky Chunky gel, the Frizz-Ease serum, and all the Sheer Blonde shampoos – can transform you from a wire-headed horror into a flaxen-tressed dream.

Ye Olde Blonde

Blonde hair has long been seen as desirable. Pliny wrote of the high price of blonde slaves. The Romans thought blonde hair was a sign of aristocracy – and covered their curly bonces with arsenic and saffron in an effort to turn fair. During the Renaissance, Italian women used horse urine and liquorice to lighten their hair. Things continued in this Jackass-style combination- recipe manner until 1907, when a French chemist called Eugene Schueller manufactured a hair dye in his one-bedroom flat. Eugene used hydrogen peroxide (discovered in 1818, by LJ Thenard, another Frenchman), and called the product Auréole (French for "halo"). By 1911, he was marketing his product and changed the name of his company to L'Oréal. Don't blame him for the "Because you're worth it" nonsense, though. That's Jennifer Aniston's fault.

The Gradual Blonde

Those of us who have spent untold years and thousands of pounds on Being Blonde, harbour much resentment towards the Gradual Blonde. That is, she who moves slowly, over a period of subtle months, from brunette to blonde, until one day you turn round and realise that you both have the same hair, even though, in your mind, the Gradual Blonde is still as dark as when she started. Examples are: Sara Cox, Nicole Appleton, Margaret Thatcher. Often, especially with British female TV presenters (64 per cent of whom are blonde: fact!), the Gradual Blonde can't stop herself once she's off, and ends up going the full Bottle Blonde hog. Ulrika Jonsson, Zoë Ball, Kate Thornton: every one an ex-streaky blonde turned all-over bleach-monkey. Ulrika, famously, doesn't actually need to do this, as she is a natural blonde. This is very, very unusual. In fact, there is only one other in the world: Cate Blanchett. Everyone else is telling fibs.

The Swedes

Actually, that's not entirely true. In Sweden, around 50 per cent of the population are totally natural blondes. That's 4.5 million tow-heads who have never known the pink itch of an over-peroxided scalp. Out of that 4.5 million, we in the UK only acknowledge Ulrika. Oh, and Agnetha from Abba, of course – although Bjorn from Abba was also blonde. He doesn't count, though, because he's a man. The word "blonde" is irrevocably associated with women in Britain, not least because we can't be bothered to take the feminine "e" off the end when referring to men.

Famous Blondes, and the Dumb Kind

The most famous of all is Marilyn Monroe, though you could argue for Madonna, or Barbie (the most popular doll in the history of the world: sells $1.5bn worth a year). Marilyn was preceded by Jean Harlow, who played her role more coolly than Monroe. Harlow used her blondeness as a sexual threat. Marilyn used her blondeness sexually, too, but in a far less confrontational manner. Actually, even today, Monroe is seen as the epitome of the dumb blonde, as beloved by stereotypers across the world.

The dumb-blonde cliché has been explained by clever people – cleverer than poor dumb me, anyway – who worked out that in the Stone Age, men looked for young, healthy, fertile mates. Light hair is associated with youth, as Caucasians are fairer in skin and hair tone when they're children. So blonde women are seen as fertile, ie desirable, but also as childlike, meaning naive, vulnerable, unable to tie their own shoelaces or remember the days of the week in the right order.

How to Treat a Blonde

Same way you treat anyone else, you rude git. But few people remember this. In fact, recent research has shown that equally qualified blondes do not get the jobs that their brunette sisters do. And even when we do, we're paid less – which is ridiculous, if you consider how much we spend on our hair. Separate tests gave similar results in the UK, in Ireland, and in the US. The fact is, we're discriminated against, though, to make up for it, at least we get served first at the bar. There's an insubstantiality associated with blondeness that is hard to counter, especially if you're good-natured. Everyone will keep explaining stuff, and if you assert yourself, you're seen as throwing your toys out of your pram (that kid thing again). Brunettes are allowed to be efficient without people bursting into spontaneous applause and yelping, "Well done, you!".

Blonde Addiction

When I hit 30, I decided to grow out my blondicity and revert to my natural colour, brun souris. I thought this would make me look more mature, and, perhaps, make me feel likewise. Unfortunately, an inch into my plan, I discovered a clump of grey that I was too vain to let run free. Dyeing my hair brown would entail a root-job every three weeks; streaking it blonde would let me pretend that the grey was, in fact, just natural highlights. I stayed streaky. Also, in truth, it's hard to go brunette when you went blonde specifically to make yourself more attractive. Contact lenses and peroxide were my saving graces as a teenager: reverting to glasses and brown hair would bring up too many traumatic memories.

Random Blonde Facts

Tesco informs that just under 40 per cent of the total UK hair-dye market is blonde (red is next up, at 17 per cent). We spend more than £100m a year on the stuff. One in four of Tesco Professional Haircare sales is a blonde-aiding shampoo or conditioner. Somerfield research found that shoppers prefer tills at which the cashier is blonde. Twenty-six per cent of British men think that blondes make better lovers, though 57 per cent of them would prefer to marry a brunette. Presumably, they think that, on balance, a lifetime's hot rumpy action isn't worth the accompanying hassle from other men. Either that, or they're worried about the mortgage: after all, at least a brunette will bring in a proper wage, eh?

...And why I'm proud to be a brunette

By Suzi Feay

Growing up in a world of blonde archetypes – Cinderella, Farrah Fawcett, Jerry Hall – you had to hunt down your brunette role models. My favourite authors always stressed the plainness of non-blonde heroines. Brunettes could be brave, resourceful, clever – attractive in every way, save the physical.

The reader was constantly told that Joey Bettany, the black-haired free spirit of The Chalet School, was a fright: too thin, too sallow, too often racked by a cough. Yet she kept up her joie de vivre over 80 or so volumes. Jo March – the brutal clipping of whose dark tresses is one of the key scenes in Little Women – is likewise a galumphing gal, clumsy, clever, courageous. And who gets to marry the charming Laurie? Blonde Amy, that's who. Jo gets a middle-aged, bearded German, and it's presented as quite a good match – for a brunette. The injustice of it still rankles.

Sara, the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, is also, yawn, plain and dark-haired. Clever, noble and imaginative, like so many overlooked brunettes, she is really a "little princess" in disguise. The dark hair being part of the disguise, presumably.

Things looked up in the teenage years. I encountered Du Maurier's devilishly beautiful Rebecca, and the unforgettable Scarlett O'Hara. Both ate blondes for breakfast. Royals, too, have always had a thing for brunettes: has any blonde trophy wife wreaked as much havoc as witchy, six-fingered Anne Boleyn? Or Diane de Poitiers, mistress of several French kings? And it was brunette Wallis Simpson who dethroned Edward VIII – though the mysterious "Singapore grip" may have had something to do with it.

Now, of course, we've got Nigella, the Ishtar of the egg-whisk. And who is the most prominent blonde seductress? Erm, Camilla. No thanks.

I do know something of both conditions, having spent my twenties as a misbegotten blonde. (Nobody seemed to guess – but then, nobody thought I was stupid and/or ravishing either.) It was tiresome: no, not the endless hot dates, but the fact that the only people who kept their heads inverted in bowls more devotedly were bulimics. Did I have "more fun"? If you don't have fun at that age, frankly, nothing trichological will help you.

I'm now a born-again brunette, as nature intended. And thank goodness. You never heard of history being rewritten for a mouse, did you?

British Blondes: National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London WC2, 3 March-6 July. Blondes Have More Fun: Getty Images Gallery, 3 Jubilee Place, London SW3, 6 March-26 April.

'On Blondes', by Joanna Pitman (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is out on 3 March