'I just pine for the days when blondes weren't perceived as being hard-nosed', writes Louise Williams.
ROBBIE KEANE HAS married a Barbie doll - off-white nylon hair, glittery dress, all-over body tan and tone. Claudine Palmer, you look beautiful in the photos of your big day. I don't know if you've always aspired to that look, but in your wedding snaps, you've really nailed it, you are man-made. It's your synthetic hair that got me thinking - thinking about blondes.
Everywhere I turn, there are more and more blondes hitting the headlines: white blondes, yellow blondes, streaky blondes, brassy blondes. Mostly they're shown in magazines publicising their "achievements" - from opening night clubs to entering beauty pageants to marrying men with large bank accounts.
They're easily dismissed, these hordes of blonde women, and my friends do it a lot. "She's a typical, you know, blonde," they say, or maybe "So fake, so blonde, for God's sake." Then their eyes roll around to my mop of fair hair. "Oh, we don't mean you though, you're different . . . obviously," they mutter awkwardly.
I happen to have been born blonde thanks to a random blonde gene (both my sisters are dark-haired) but I don't want to fall back on the old argument that natural blondes aren't dumb blondes (oh no, never) and let everyone off the hook. I don't feel the urge to defend platinum socialites either, but this criticism being aired in our direction is aimed at all blondes - bottle and born - so we're all in this together.
Now it's not as if we blondes are new to the business of being dismissed. Our skin is already thick from decades of being stupid and easy. We're well used to the jokes - hell, I still like to tell a few classics.
But in the past few years, the criticism has been getting increasingly vicious - we're collectively blamed for the worst excesses of celebrity culture, on account of having blonde locks. "Vapid", "hard-nosed", "gold-diggers" and "plastic" are just some of the terms of abuse I've heard recently. Whatever happened to the appreciation of blondes in the style of Marilyn Monroe, when we were expected to be more fun?
It all comes down to economics, y'see. Blondeness has been commodified, it has an established economic value. You invest in peroxide, you reap the financial reward. The pay-off might be a bit part on TV or the netting of some rich man - it's not rocket science (we are talking blondes, after all).
Of course you need to do some marketing, place your product carefully, but for now, it seems like a safe investment, especially if accompanied (as it often is) by further outlay and expansion in the chest area. It is delivering results for a growing number of blonde-by-choice women. They may be becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other, but that doesn't seem to be having a detrimental effect on their market value.
There are more and more blondes on the telly, in magazines, in music, and they're certainly showing up for lots of parties. They are high achievers of sorts, although perhaps not on a particularly challenging career path. But are they really so worthy of your dislike? Why are you taking lashings of peroxide so seriously?
Well, if blonde hair is a fast ticket to success on the celebrity circuit and financial rewards, it is undermining the values of hard work and equality that women have fought for centuries to achieve. Society today despises success and financial gain based on something as flimsy as light locks acquired down at the hairdresser. But just because some blondies choose to colour their hair in order to move up in the world, don't blame all of us!
I just pine for the days when blondes weren't perceived as being hard-nosed. We used to be gently teased with jokes about dipsy blondes who needed to wear a Walkman playing the phrase "breathe in, breathe out" in order to stay alive, or the artificial intelligence gag - the blonde who dyed her hair brown.
I miss the days when blondes weren't seen as undermining modern-day feminist values, when we could laugh off our image as dumb and fun, rather than a threat to hard-working women.
And I wish I'd been around during our golden age, when we were portrayed in Italian Renaissance paintings as enlightened, our scalps aglow with knowledge.
So next time you see a blonde head on the street, why don't you take that light hair to indicate an innocent aesthetic choice at the very least, or possibly even inner enlightenment, rather than a manifestation of our cold, hard-nosed ambition?