58 Fun Facts About Blonde Hair

Blond hair is characterised by low levels of which dark pigment?

Eumelanin. It is the brown-black form of melanin, and hair colour is largely a sliding scale of it: black hair has a lot, brown hair a moderate amount and blond hair very little.

Why is natural blond hair significantly less common in adults than in children?

It tends to darken with age. Many fair-haired children have brown hair by their teens, probably because pigment-making proteins switch on as hormones change around puberty.

The English word 'blond' comes from Old French and possibly from Medieval Latin 'blundus', meaning what?

Yellow. The root is uncertain, though, and in French the word once named a shade between golden and light chestnut; English borrowed it in the 1400s and again in the 1600s.

Traditionally, the spelling 'blonde' with an e is used for whom?

Women. English kept both French forms, blond for males and blonde for females, a rare gendered spelling in English that works like fiancé and fiancée.

Which singer's 1990 world tour was called Blond Ambition?

Madonna. Jean Paul Gaultier designed the cone-bra corsets she wore on it, and a film crew followed the tour for the 1991 documentary Truth or Dare.

Europeans' hair and eyes are, on average, lightest around the shores of which sea?

The Baltic Sea's shores were among the last parts of Europe to be settled: a thick ice sheet buried the region through the last Ice Age, and people moved in only as it melted, tens of thousands of years after reaching the south.

The oldest known carrier of the main European gene variant for blond hair lived during the last Ice Age in which region?

Siberia, not Scandinavia: the variant first shows up in a teenage girl who died some 18,000 years ago at Afontova Gora, near today's Krasnoyarsk, and only later in ancient remains from Sweden and Ukraine.

Up to a tenth of which Pacific nation near Papua New Guinea is naturally blond?

Solomon Islands blonds owe nothing to European visitors: a 2012 study traced their hair to a gene variant found only in Oceania, so blondness evolved there all over again.

Blue-eyed blonds occasionally turn up among which people, who lived in North Africa long before the Arab conquests?

The Berbers are mostly dark-haired, but blue-eyed blonds do appear among them, and a 1911 Britannica entry was already grumbling that their numbers had been overstated.

Which fair-haired fairy-tale character was a rude old woman when her tale was first printed in 1837?

Goldilocks began as a nameless old woman in Robert Southey's 1837 tale, who escapes the bears by jumping out of a window; later retellers swapped her for a little girl.

In Disney's Tangled, what happens to Rapunzel's magical golden hair as soon as it is cut?

It turns brown and loses its magic, which is why Flynn Rider slices it off with a shard of mirror: with nothing left to keep her young, Mother Gothel withers to dust.

A lock of which Renaissance noblewoman's blonde hair, which Lord Byron called the fairest imaginable, is kept in Milan?

Lucrezia Borgia's lock sits in Milan's Ambrosiana library beside her love letters to the poet Pietro Bembo; Byron read them in 1816 and boasted that he had made off with a strand of the hair.

Fagg El Gamous, a Roman-era cemetery where many of the dead had blond or red hair, lies in which country?

Egypt's dry sand mummified the bodies naturally, hair included, and the dig's database shows the blond burials clustered in one area and the redheads in another, hinting at family plots.

In the Iliad, Athena grabs which hero by his fair hair to stop him drawing his sword on Agamemnon?

Achilles obeys her: Athena, visible to him alone, promises that the insult will one day bring him three times the gifts if he holds back, and he thrusts the sword back into its sheath.

Which king of Sparta does Homer repeatedly call 'fair-haired'?

Menelaus wears the epithet 'xanthos', fair-haired, throughout Homer, and the Odyssey promises him the Elysian plain instead of death because, as Helen's husband, he is Zeus's son-in-law.

In the Greco-Roman world, dyed blonde hair was a trademark of which group?

Prostitutes made dyed fair hair so much their badge that the Athenian playwright Menander ruled that no chaste woman ought to copy it.

'Xanthias', from the Greek for fair or reddish hair, was Greek comedy's stock name for which people, many of them Thracians?

Slaves so often came from Thrace, whose people Greeks pictured as red-blond, that the name stuck; in Aristophanes' The Frogs, a Xanthias lugs the god Dionysus's baggage down to the underworld.

Which sculptor made the Parthenon's colossal Athena of ivory and gold, her hair perhaps gold too?

Phidias fixed the gold in removable plates; on the eve of war with Sparta, Pericles counted them among Athens's reserves, to be borrowed only if every ounce was put back.

Which Roman poet, who coined 'bread and circuses', wrote that the empress Messalina slipped out at night under a blond wig?

Juvenal's sixth Satire has her wait until her husband, Emperor Claudius, is asleep, then hide her black hair and steal out with a single maid under the alias Lycisca.

Suetonius says which emperor, who boasted of leaving Rome a city of marble, had hair inclined to golden?

Augustus cared so little about it that he had several barbers clip him at once, in a hurry, while he read or wrote.

The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that which people all had fierce blue eyes, reddish hair and huge frames?

The Germans all looked alike, Tacitus reasoned in his Germania, because they had never intermarried with other peoples; he added that they could bear cold and hunger but not heat or thirst.

Loki once cut off the golden hair of which Norse goddess, the wife of Thor?

Sif got new hair of real gold that grew like her own, forged by dwarfs after Thor threatened to break every bone in Loki's body; the same errand produced Thor's hammer.

Which legendary heroine, the lover of the knight Tristan, is known in medieval romance as 'the Blonde'?

Iseult shares her name with Tristan's later wife, Iseult 'of the White Hands', who in the verse romances tells the dying Tristan that his rescue ship flies a black sail, and he gives up and dies.

In Game of Thrones, which family's golden hair on the royal children tells Ned Stark who their real father is?

Lannister gold gave it away, because the king's line was dark: Ned's book of lineages listed Baratheon after Baratheon as 'black of hair', until it reached Joffrey, 'goldenhead'.

Which Renaissance painter's Venus stands naked on a giant seashell, covering herself with her long blond hair?

Botticelli made the hair catch the light by brushing real gold into it.

Which storybook heroine is usually drawn as a blonde, although her real-life namesake had short dark hair?

Alice got her fair hair from the illustrator John Tenniel; dark-haired Alice Liddell, who had asked Lewis Carroll to write the story down, sold his handwritten original in 1928 for £15,400.

The courtesan called the first recorded 'dumb blonde' was mocked in a 1775 stage satire in which city?

Paris enjoyed Les Curiosités de la Foire, which mocked the fair, vapid courtesan Rosalie Duthé, until her noble admirers threatened the theatre's director with a beating and he dropped it.

Anita Loos followed her 1925 bestseller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with a sequel claiming that gentlemen marry whom?

Brunettes was a pointed choice from a brunette author: Anita Loos said she began the first book on a train, after watching men fuss over a blonde while she hauled down her own luggage.

Which pop artist turned a Marilyn Monroe publicity photo into rows of silkscreened faces with bright blonde hair in 1962?

Andy Warhol started within weeks of her death in August 1962, cropping a publicity still for her 1953 film Niagara; his Marilyn Diptych repeats it fifty times, one panel in colour and the other fading to black and white.

The original 'Platinum Blonde' played a film star hounded by her studio and family in which 1933 Hollywood send-up?

Bombshell was loosely modelled on the silent star Clara Bow, and within weeks it was being advertised as The Blonde Bombshell, a phrase that long outlived the film.

The 'Platinum Blonde' star of Hell's Angels was born in Kansas City in 1911 under which name?

Harlean Harlow Carpenter was simply 'the Baby' to her family and only learned her real first name when she started school; her screen name, Jean Harlow, was her mother's maiden name.

Which magnate signed the future 'Platinum Blonde' and directed her in Hell's Angels (1930)?

Howard Hughes was reshooting his silent air epic with sound, and his Norwegian star Greta Nissen's accent no longer suited her English character, so he gave the part to an unknown 18-year-old.

Marilyn Monroe was born under which name?

Norma Jeane Mortenson got 'Marilyn' from a Fox executive who thought she resembled the Broadway star Marilyn Miller, and 'Monroe' from her mother's maiden name.

Which James Bond actor's casting was met with 'too blond' complaints and a fan website urging a boycott?

Daniel Craig was called too blond, too craggy and too obscure, and the site danielcraigisnotbond.com urged fans to stay away; Casino Royale then became the highest-grossing Bond film up to that time.

Which director likened blonde leading ladies to 'virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints'?

Alfred Hitchcock began that remark with 'Blondes make the best victims', and he cast to match: Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren each came to harm on screen in his films.

Which actor's gunslinger is nicknamed 'Blondie' by the bandit Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

Clint Eastwood's drifter was 'the Man with No Name' only in the marketing, a label United Artists devised for the American release; on screen he is Joe, then Manco, then Blondie, for his light hair.

Which hair-colour brand's adverts famously asked whether it is true that blondes have more fun?

Clairol's line came from the copywriter Shirley Polykoff, a bottle blonde herself; her other hit, 'Does she... or doesn't she?', echoed the suspicious question she imagined her future mother-in-law asking.

In Legally Blonde (2001), Elle Woods succeeds at which law school despite prejudice about her looks?

Harvard was only the film's setting: Amanda Brown based the story on her own time as a fashion-obsessed blonde at a rival, Stanford Law School.

Which French star of And God Created Woman made a teased, piled-up blonde hairdo nicknamed the 'choucroute' famous?

Brigitte Bardot's backcombed, deliberately tousled pile of hair was named for what it resembled: choucroute is the French word for sauerkraut.

The band Blondie was formed in New York City in 1974 by guitarist Chris Stein and which singer?

Debbie Harry supplied the name as well as the voice: truck drivers who spotted her bleached hair kept shouting 'Hey, Blondie!' as they drove past.

Which Blondie number one began as a slow 1975 demo the band called 'The Disco Song'?

Heart of Glass sat unreleased for three years until the producer Mike Chapman reworked the old demo for the 1978 album Parallel Lines; it then topped the charts in both Britain and America.

Which golden-haired storybook boy from a tiny asteroid asks a pilot stranded in the desert to draw him a sheep?

The Little Prince's hair matters to the story: the fox he tames says that wheat fields, useless to a fox, will now be dear to him because their gold will bring the boy to mind.

Which oxidising agent is used to bleach hair blonde?

Hydrogen peroxide oxidises the melanin inside each hair until the pigment turns colourless, while the ammonia mixed with it swells the hair's outer cuticle to let the bleach in.

Eugène Schueller, credited with creating the first synthetic hair dye in 1907, founded which company?

L'Oréal began in 1909 under a far plainer name, the French Harmless Hair Dye Company, with Schueller mixing the dyes himself and selling them to hairdressers.

Bleached blondes wash with a shampoo of which colour to cancel the brassy tones that creep into lightened hair?

Purple pigment neutralises the brassy tint that bleaching leaves behind, because complementary colours cancel each other out; salon toners work on the same principle.

Blonde hair that goes green in a swimming pool has usually absorbed which metal, rather than the chlorine that gets blamed?

Copper, not chlorine, does the staining: it gets into pool water from algae-killing chemicals and copper pipes, then clings to light hair, above all hair already roughened by bleaching or heat.

The 'disappearing blonde gene' hoax falsely claimed which body predicted blonds' extinction by 2202?

The World Health Organization had to issue a statement saying it had no idea how the reports began and 'no opinion on the future existence of blondes', after the BBC, CNN and ABC News had all run the story.

An anti-Nazi joke described the ideal Aryan as blond like Hitler, tall like Goebbels and slim like which Nazi leader?

Hermann Göring was famously fat, just as Hitler was no blond and Goebbels was short; around 1941 the Soviet cartoonist Boris Yefimov drew all three under his own version of the taunt.

Pliny the Elder said the Gauls invented which product, made from tallow and ashes, to tint their hair red?

Soap, in Pliny's Natural History, is a hair product and a treatment for sores rather than something to wash with; he adds that it came in a hard form and a liquid one, and that men used it more than women.

Which spiky-haired British rocker reached number one in America with his 1978 disco-tinged album Blondes Have More Fun?

Rod Stewart's album carried 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?', whose chorus borrowed a Jorge Ben Jor melody, 'unconscious plagiarism' as he later admitted; the single's royalties went to UNICEF.

Which shade of fair hair is also known as 'Venetian' blond?

Strawberry blond got its other name from Renaissance Venice, where women bleached their hair on rooftop terraces, spreading it over the brim of a crownless hat called a solana.

Which word for pale blond hair comes from the plant whose fibres are spun into linen?

Flaxen hair is named for the pale fibres of the flax plant, and the coarse fibres combed out of them, called tow, gave us 'towhead' for a very fair-haired person.

'Dishwater' is a less flattering name for which shade of fair hair?

Dirty blond is a dark blond bordering on light brown, and 'dishwater' flatters nothing: the saying 'dull as dishwater' began as 'dull as ditchwater' and moved from the roadside to the kitchen sink.

The usual scientific explanation for light hair evolving in northern Europe ties it to what?

Vitamin D synthesis in weak sunlight is thought to have favoured paler skin far from the equator, and lighter hair is usually explained as part of the same loss of pigment.

In which anime series does the hero's black hair go golden when rage unlocks his 'Super Saiyan' form?

Dragon Ball's creator Akira Toriyama said he made the form blond to spare his assistant, who had been spending a lot of time blacking in Goku's hair on the black-and-white manga pages.

Which singer's first country hit was 'Dumb Blonde', a 1966 single written by Curly Putman?

Dolly Parton has a stock reply to the title: dumb-blonde jokes never bother her, she says, because she knows she isn't dumb and she knows she isn't blonde.

DNA from which 10,000-year-old skeleton, found in a Somerset gorge, suggested early Britons had dark skin and dark hair?

Cheddar Man was long assumed to have been pale, but his genes pointed to dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes, the usual look of Europe's hunter-gatherers then; about a tenth of British ancestry today traces back to his people.

In a 2016 study testing the 'dumb blonde' stereotype, how did natural blonde women's average IQ compare with other women's?

Slightly higher is how the Ohio State economist Jay Zagorsky put it: among white American women, natural blondes averaged 103.2 and no other hair colour topped 102.7, a gap too small to prove anything except that the stereotype is wrong.