Comments on: Bygone brunette beauty: Fashion in hair color

By: diana

diana — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:24:34 +0000

Steve,

"Blonde hair is shinier, so it catches the eye more."

I'm not going to go all gnxp on you and say, "cite the source." I'll just say I disagree.

But I do agree that the main component of beautiful hair IS shininess. If you have dull hair, no matter how thick & silky, it is ugly.

I have seen dull blonde hair ("dishwater blond"); dull brown hair but never dull black hair.

The thing about shiny blonde hair as opposed to shiny dark hair is that it's unusual. And anything unsual catches the eye more.

BTW I just got an "e-lert" from the Estee Lauder company advertising that their four models (Hurley, Paltrow and two others whose names I forget) are coming to Bloomingdales NYC at the same time.

ALL FOUR have blue or green eyes. Two blondes, two brunettes. So, heavy overrep of blondes and completely unrep eye color!

But a very unique and small sample size....

By: agnostic

agnostic — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:12:20 +0000

I just did an analysis of all the girls who've appeared on the cover of Maxim from 1997 to present, and will post more detail soon, but the average is 2.8, where 1 = light blond, 2 = dark blond, 3 = light brown, and 4 = dark brown. So, women who want to be noticed today are light brown, not blond.

There is no trend over time in Maxim as in Playboy, though Maxim's only been around 10 years.

Maxim targets younger audiences, while IIRC the average Playboy reader is 33. So again, we likely have a co-hort effect -- readers brought up during the heyday of blonds want more blonds, while those brought up as blond popularity was plateauing want darker hair.

As far as overrepresentation goes, light blonds are about 40% more common than in the general population, but dark browns are about 60% more common. It looks like the middle is wiped out in favor of emphasizing the two extremes, which appeal to blond-lovers and brunette-lovers. Evidently, among Maxim's target audience, there are more brunette-lovers.

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:03:20 +0000

Blonde hair is shinier, so it catches the eye more. It’s the same reason that most women’s jewelry is gold or silver.

Women who want to be noticed tend to dye their hair the most noticeable color.

By: agnostic

agnostic — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:54:06 +0000

Miss Maxim shows only 1/6 blonds, even though about 1/2 of the countries could easily find blonds.

http://www.maximonline.com/miss_maxim/

I've looked at the "Maxim Hot 100" list before, and so has Audacious Epigone, but we're probably wrong to do that. We should look at the Maxim counterpart of the "centerfold girl," like these girls.

By: razib

razib — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:37:57 +0000

p.s. australians are not that different from the dutch and icelanders from what i recall, and there you have a population of roughly the same geographic origin as the USA, but fewer germans and more british isles ancestry, with a non-trivial but minority southern european quanta.

By: razib

razib — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:35:37 +0000

Since blue eyes are mostly a recessive trait, less assortative mating will preserve the allele frequencies but diminish the genotype frequencies.

assman, this would be more persuasive if consanginuity among americans around 1900 were like among many arab groups. but that's no so. i mean, that would imply that across america there were blue-eyed towns and brown-eyed towns. but again, this is a new country and though there are cases of whole villages transferring en masse (i'm thinking of instances where a village in norway simply relocated over a generation to minnesota town, etc.), usually towns were founded by disparate groups of newcomers not closely related to each other. compared to other pre-20th century peoples my understanding is that americans were especially mobile (the frontier and all). the model doesn't pass the smell test, it seems that it is way more likely that it's an artifact of measurement or something.

By: agnostic

agnostic — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:10:40 +0000

The early 20th century blue eye figure I cited above is not consistent with what we should expect from old stock Americans, and such a decline is not plausibly a result of Italian immigration (the only immigrant population significantly different in eye color). The numbers are suspect.

Suspect meaning you think it should be higher or lower? In Icelanders, 80% of men and 70% of women have blue eyes. In the Dutch, it's 70% and 52%.

Since blue eyes are mostly a recessive trait, less assortative mating will preserve the allele frequencies but diminish the genotype frequencies. The authors of the study you quoted suggest just that: people assort less on appearance than they used to, and more on education, social status, etc. Again, that'll affect the prevalence of blond hair by the same logic.

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:18:02 +0000

Yes, that figure is consistent with the newer numbers above (from 1974 and 1993) and the earlier hair data in John Beddoe's The Races of Britain (1885).

The early 20th century blue eye figure I cited above is not consistent with what we should expect from old stock Americans, and such a decline is not plausibly a result of Italian immigration (the only immigrant population significantly different in eye color). The numbers are suspect.

I think this suggests blonds have been favored and overrepresented in media since at least the 50s.

By: Peter Frost

Peter Frost — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:50:21 +0000

It is difficult to get good anthropological data on hair color for a number of reasons:

1. Hair color varies continuously, so it is difficult, for instance, to draw the line between 'blonde' and 'light brown'.

2. Many people dye their hair, particularly those who are prematurely gray. Such people may not always tell the investigator.

3. Hair color changes with age. At 1 year of age, 50% of male white children from Louisville, Kentucky had light hair. At 6 years of age, only 26% of the same sample had light hair. (Matheny & Dolan, Am. J. Phys. Anthrop. 42: 53-56). Hair color continues to darken from 6 to 18 years of age (Steggerda, J. Heredity, 32: 402-403). This darkening seems to proceed faster in males than in females.

4. Physical anthropologists have shunned this field of research since WWII. This is partly because it is seen as having Nazi connotations and partly because physical anthropologists became convinced that genetic markers (e.g., blood groups, enzymes, etc.) provide a more scientific picture of human variability.

On the other hand, I've seen a number of studies that peg the percentage of blondes among 'old-stock' Americans and English peoples at around 20-25%. Since this ballpark figure comes up so often, there must be something to it.

By: pconroy

pconroy — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:33:26 +0000

I know that dyed blonde hair is big in Eastern Europe, and here in New York pretty much every Greek woman I’ve seen has dyed blonde hair – or as the Aussies like to call it, “suicide blonde”

By: diana

diana — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:36:58 +0000

"My grandmother remarked to me that during her youth (1930s-1940s) the bottle blonde was seen as something of a tart"

Because they were? If something is socially proscribed then those who do it tend to be non-conformists.

Even the phrase "bottle blonde" has a disapproving ring.

By: mc

mc — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:46:24 +0000

Someone suggest blonds are "syndromal"? What about Tiny Tim? Didn't he have some kind of brunette syndrome?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skU-jBFzXl0

I often see people here and there, totally unrelated, who share a certain "look". I see people who sort of look like me, and find they think sort of think like me too.
It would be fascinating to trace one of these "looks" back to their owners' early genetic pool. They might be examples of extended families within the "extended family" that is race/ethnicity.
Despite a bit of bias towards the mediteranean type, I have to admit my niece and nephew are blond and looked like the proverbial angels when they were little.
Nothing "syndromal" about their looks, but then again, maybe there is. The rare "sunny blonds with natural peachy tans, full lips, etched eyebrows and dusky lashes syndrome." I think that's the one Hollywood had in mind.

Nevertheless, my niece disliked her blond hair and threatened to dye it red or black, but piercing her finely etched eyebrows with metal rings distracted her from that ambition.
Around 14 the once chubby tow head startled everyone by becoming a Boticelli beauty resembling the girl who disappeared forever in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Yet still she doesn't think she's pretty.
I blame the 1965 Immigration Act. Just kidding.

I'm sort of a blond convert though. Blonds are not intrinsically more beautiful than brunettesand arguing is pretty pointless. This debate goes back centuries, but somehow those blond wigs won't go away.

By: trajan23

trajan23 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:37:24 +0000

What about the decline in the social stigma of cosmetics/hair dying? My grandmother remarked to me that during her youth (1930s-1940s) the bottle blonde was seen as something of a tart, and the practise of lightening hair was strongly associated with suspect catagories: Actresses, prostitutes, etc. Even now, with hair lightening a much more socially acceptible practise, extreme dye-jobs carry with them lower class connotations.

By: razib

razib — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:02:42 +0000

jason, that’s why you have to look to the victorians. people like galton actually were interested in counting….

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:14:25 +0000

Wow... I am seriously disappointed in physical anthropology. This is really the best information we've been passed down on hair and eye colors? Poorly sourced second and third-hand maps with mysteriously obtained and quantified information?

Why are we left with no real data? How hard is it to count hair colors?? Not one anthropologist cared? This is pathetic.

By: agnostic

agnostic — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:36:10 +0000

Perhaps over time the philosophy has evolved toward featuring fantasy figures.

Men these days must have some pretty androgynous fantasies, then, since sex symbols have become less hourglass in shape and smaller in the chest (pictures of the '50s and '60s Playmates are pretty eye-opening). Angelina Jolie is pretty, but she has a pretty masculine skull -- and even more masculine personality.

The authors state they couldn't find this data, so they construct their own norm sample from undergraduates.

Their article is from 1993, and if blue eyes are steadily dwindling from 55% to 34% to 17% (early 20th C, mid-20th, late 20th), which the authors say is probably due to less assortative mating by ethnicity, then blond hair must be following a similar trend -- and hence, the prevalence of blonds in the 1950s and '60s would've been noticeably higher than the 27% estimate from 1993.

It's not unreasonable to project backward and get 40 - 45% blond at mid-20th C., as per the estimates in the "brown eyed girl" post. Those data are from samples with over 1000 people, rather than a smaller convenience sample.

By: pconroy

pconroy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:08:34 +0000

Steve,

Or maybe today’s “girl next door” is a dyed blonde :)

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:29:38 +0000

Maybe there has been a change in Playboy’s philosophy. Wasn’t the original idea to feature the “girl next door” — i.e., a normal, healthy-looking non-stripper. Perhaps over time the philosophy has evolved toward featuring fantasy figures.

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:15:09 +0000

But what I'm curious about is what they think the baseline level of blondness is in the population... Then go to my graph of percent blond by year. No way are the 1960s above 40 - 45%

This is an important question, and you'd think the answer would be easy to find. The authors state they couldn't find this data, so they construct their own norm sample from undergraduates. The rates are 68.1% brunette, 26.8% blond, and 5.1% red. So blonds are overrepresented in every decade, with Playboy featuring more overrepresentation than the women's magazines.

Another study on blond CEOs in the UK faces a similar problem as the last study. The authors assert that there is hair color data for the UK on the CIA Factbook website. I simply can't find this kind of data anywhere at that website. They say this CIA data is supported by another study... of American undergraduates??

Anyway their numbers are 68% brunette, 25% blond, 1% red, and 6% black. So pretty much the same as the other undergraduate study.

The supporting study also shows that blond hair and blue eyes often go together. This suggests (natural) blond hair has been declining even as it is has become more popular, consistent with the Frost study linked above.

"About half of Americans born at the turn of the century had blue eyes, according to a 2002 Loyola University study in Chicago [Actually 57.4% - JM]. By mid-century that number had dropped to a third. Today only about 1 out of every 6 Americans has blue eyes..."

Quote. Study.

By: diana

diana — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:19:57 +0000

Phew, I’m relieved. OTOH, Dark Triad Skillz sounds interesting…..