I recently bought On Blondes, by British author Joanna Pitman, to read on the airplane. Well, it's a decent, if somewhat trashy, text. Not a lot of concrete red meat science, rather, a pop culture history.

But one thing that I found interesting in the history is Pitman's assertion that blondism, though often sexually desirable in European women, also has had a strong assocation with wanton sluttishness. This connection was so strong that Greek playrights satirized it (Athenian courtesans dyed their hair blonde), Church Fathers propagandized against it (Tertullian's disgust with the human condition extended to wigs made from the hair of pagan Germans) , while between 1650 and the Victorian Age, flaxen hair was considered a mark of low class and lower morals (an age when a fair-haired girl of breeding was marked with shame?). While in pervious pro-blonde eras (the Renaissance for instance) the use of hair lightening dye was common, in the period after 1650 European nobility idealized a more dark-haired beauty on the model of Barbara Villiers, mistress of Charles II ( ironically a woman of supposed whorish disposition herself), and darkening agents were not unknown.

But, I think it is safe to say that this is an age when blonde is in....