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.’
Pitman takes us on a blonde history of the world. It is a history of sex and subterfuge, of prejudice and fantasy – the best kind of history. People, she tells us, have been obsessed with blondes since the Greeks lusted after Aphrodite, the golden-haired goddess of ‘love in all its forms’. So did the Romans, who changed her name to Venus. Pliny tells us of one man driven so wild that he defiled the famous statue of Aphrodite at Knidos; he ’embraced it intimately; a stain bears witness to his lust’. Meanwhile, in order to go blonde, ancient women spent hours dipping their hair in all sorts of unpleasant, smelly things, much as they do now. Rich Roman women who employed specialist hairdressers, stabbed them with pins when they got the tint wrong.
Clerics in the Middle Ages feared blondes, and no doubt went mad with desire thinking about them, too. When, in puritanical times, Eve took a dip in the ratings, people began to portray her as a blonde: Eve the seducer, the hussy.
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