Is It Real, or Is It Clairol?
The other day, as I was
sitting at a Paris cafe watching all the summery people sitting around or
sauntering past, something struck me. Blondes were everywhere, their bright
thatches catching the sun, but until that minute, I hadn't taken proper notice
of the fact that not one of them was a natural. A few flaxen-headed children
under 12 were, maybe. But I saw no teen-age, adult, or elderly blondes whose
blond hair actually covered their scalps all the way to the roots. Everybody
had abundant streaks or sizable tracts of blondness, all supported by dark
roots under the outer layers of golden glow.
I further
realized that this had been the case for years in Paris and New York and that I
hadn't seen a real blonde--the kind with pale lashes to match--since the last
time I was in Amsterdam. If you remain a pure blonde at 17 these days, you have
to dye your hair coppery red or pitch-black or give up all hope of chic.
Natural blondness, once the badge of physical and moral perfection, now marks
you as hopelessly true-blue, white-bread, straight-arrow, old hat. You're no
longer enticingly innocent and desirable but boringly earnest, naive, and
solemn.
True blondes used to thank providence for their hair, then
paint their brows and lashes dark to create enough smolder to match its
conventionally sexy shimmer. Dark-haired girls could dye their hair blond, but
no trace of the original color was permitted to show. Popular fiction of the
1940s and '50s was full of scathing descriptions of women whose deceptive
blondness was dark at the roots. It was the visual evidence of feet of clay, a
heart of sloth, a general moral degradation. Blondness could be false; but
integrity dwelt in keeping it perfect. Dimming natural blondes would
scrupulously dye the blond back in and touch up all traces of shadow at the
roots weekly.
Today,
sober or smoldering brunettes leave their natural roots in place and add
blondness to taste, as a patent ornament and sophisticated reference. Hair dye
that proclaims itself as such used to be marginal and nonfashionable, the
exclusive privilege of prostitutes, actresses, strippers, drag queens, and
anybody who didn't mind being taken for them. Now it is modish for both sexes.
Dennis Rodman undoubtedly had a lot to do with this. Lately, we have all wanted
to resemble exciting, quasimarginal celebrities. We want to show that we are
not afraid of their beauty secrets and can appropriate their willful blondness
or other visual caprices for our own ends.
One popular scheme for hair--top half blond,
bottom half dark--seems to have originated in the punk styles of the late
1980s, when kids bleached the top half of their spiky hair so they could dye it
green or purple. When the colors washed out, the bleached-blond effect
remained; and when the whole thing grew out, the dark roots showed up under the
pale spikes--presto! a new avant-garde fashion, contemporaneous with the start
of body piercing. These evolving styles were much deplored by the mainstream at
the time and have duly been adopted by all and sundry.
Intrigued
by all this, I looked at a recent Paris Match for some pictures of
desirable female blondes. There was Kelly Preston, the wife of John Travolta,
her blond pile of hair covering only the top half of her skull, her nape and
temples brown. There, too, was the French actress Julie Delpy, with a flowing
blond mane and an inch of dark roots, the new ideal of perfect blond young
womanhood. And there on the next page was the old ideal. It was the Grace Kelly
of 1952, every bright golden hair on her head springing straight through her
scalp out of her pure mind and elegant soul and reverently coiled into a
triumph of gleaming sculpture.
Next I looked at blondes from the more distant past. Titian
is the most famous for painting golden hair, along with his many Venetian
Renaissance followers, and it's also well known that ladies in Renaissance
Venice dyed their hair blond. There's a famous engraving showing them doing it,
with a detailed description of the method.
What were the results? Many
beauties portrayed by Titian, Palma Vecchio, and Paris Bordone catch the eye
with their rippling cascades and looped braids of brilliant yellow hair. But a
closer look shows they all have dark eyes and dark eyebrows and that their hair
spreads from a center part where at least an inch or two of dark roots is
clearly visible on either side. You can usually see more darkness along the
hairline behind the ears, too. So these Venetians were theoretical blondes,
just like Rodman and Delpy. Their dyed hair was meant not to deceive but to
function as a sort of witty allusion to an outworn creed.
In the
humanist High Renaissance, golden hair brought to mind the secular and
classical beauty of Venus and her mythological colleagues, whom such beauties
often posed as. At the same epoch, a Virgin Mary by Titian would be
forthrightly dark-haired. But his errant and penitent Mary Magdalene would use
Venus' skilled hairdresser.
To find the Grace Kelly of European painting,
you have to go back to the 15 th century in central Italy, France,
and especially the Netherlands. There you see breathtakingly pure and candid
golden hair, flowing down from the Virgin's head in a natural veil, suggesting
the descending rays of an ultimate blessing from above. Eve wears it too, as do
many female saints--the wayward Magdalene included--and many princesses. No
artifice assists these honeylike waves. This is celestially ordained blondness,
the mark of God's favor, affirming the signal beauty of the old pagan deities
who had already given all blondes--torrid or chilly, fake or real--an edge for
2,000 years.
It's a sign of a permanently
altered world that natural blondness should have such sacred power no longer.
Instead, we have reinvented the much more flexible and imaginative Venetian
blondness. We have a new awareness of how limiting and unfair the cult of fair
hair can be. Natural dark-haired beauty--despised or exoticized for eons by
Europeans, Britons, and Americans--has at last been universally recognized and
welcomed. Its varicolored roots have grown in for all to see and for all to
reckon with. Blondness has become just one of the many attractive ways to adorn
dark hair.
