Seriously, do we all have to be blonde?
A bombshell or a bomb? (Photo: Jason Merritt/Getty)
Hey, doesn’t everybody?
I woke up this morning and found NBC anchor Natalie Morales reading the news with fresh gold highlights. This would be fine if Natalie Morales were Scandanavian, I guess, but she’s a gorgeous Hispanic woman who looks best as God made her: A brunette.
Lately, the dark-eyed Kim Kardashian, formerly known as much for her glossy raven mane as for her volupuous figure, emerged with newly flaxen locks, effectively reducing herself to looking like everybody else.
And that’s the problem with these bottle blondes: They look like everybody else. They’re no longer unique individuals; they’re faces in a crowd.
Not long ago, I stood on a Manhattan street corner waiting for an artificially blonde friend. She’s average height, about 5’5, and I soon found out that a good percentage of women in that section of Manhattan are the same size and wear their hair exactly as she does: Blonde and blown out.
My friend, like the teenager I mentioned, has naturally dark and wavy hair, but it’s been tortured into another thing altogether. It made me kind of sad, standing on the corner watching all the clones walk by.
Several hairdressers have told me that I, who grew up auburn, have a “great base” for blonde hair before insisting I let them pour on the gold. I resisted. I was raised the only non-blonde in a house of natural blondes, and I plan to stay that way.
Besides, I liken hairdressers who push the blonde to drug dealers. Once you go for it it, you need a fix every few weeks, lest you show up at the office looking cheap. Touchups are pricey. Pushing the blonde is lucrative business.
But what do you think?
Does straight, blonde hair make us beautiful? Or just average?
“Does straight, blonde hair make us beautiful? Or just average?”
It’s a great question actually and I believe, based from years of listening to woman talk, that blond seems to be the “Make myself feel good about myself color.” I don’t think there’s much wrong with a lady going blond. What I have always had problems with is the way commercials (the beauty industry) can make a woman, or man, feel like crap!
Get rid of those wrinkles, baldness, large hips etc.
I think if a woman goes blond, or highlighted because it makes her feel better about herself, more power to her. I would just hope she’s not doing it because of low self esteem brought on by society or the beauty industry.
“Does straight, blonde hair make us beautiful? Or just average?”
It depends on the woman! There’s no color as beautiful on a girl as the color she was born with, and for some women, that’s blonde. Non-natural blondes can look lovely with flaxen hair, too, but it’s not a shade for everybody. The same applies to hair texture, whether straight, wavy, or curly.
While it can be fun to experiment with hair color and style, when a dark-complexioned or ethnic woman goes blonde and straight permanently, it sends a message that dark can’t be beautiful. An example would be Beyonce Knowles, who is a gorgeous biracial woman with naturally dark hair but is virtually always a flatironed blonde.
One of the ironies of the blonde craze is that studies have shown that men actually prefer brunettes! (I’ve never seen any research about what texture they prefer.)
At the end of the day, if a woman genuinely likes the bottle blonde, blown-out look and thinks it enhances her, then fine. But it’s a shame if she’s wasting all that time and money at the salon because she imagines everyone else thinks she’s hotter that way!