All the fun of the fair

In this chunky book, Joanna Pitman tells us something we already suspect to be true, and she does it beautifully. We are, she says, obsessed with blonde hair. For instance, even though only one in 20 of us is naturally blonde, a third of women lighten their hair. Why? Because blonde hair gets you more attention. Blonde hair is a magnet for sex and money. When she bleached her own hair, Pitman tells us, the change was dramatic. People stared. ‘The way they looked,’ she says, ‘it felt as if my head was radiating some kind of spectral glow.’ As a blonde, she got ‘preferential treatment’. Men gave her ‘wolfish looks’. ‘I wondered,’ she says, ‘whether I could afford not to be blonde.’

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