Status: Hoax reported as news
Peter Frost has an article in the current issue of
Evolution and Human Behavior in which he argues that the trait for blonde hair evolved 10,000 years ago in northern Europe because men found blonde women to be attractive--and because there were more women than men, the women had to compete for the men. (I'm simplifying his argument a lot.) But I'm not bringing this up to make a point about Frost's article. Instead, I'm bringing it up because the
London Times discusses his article and concludes with this observation:
Film star blondes such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Stone and Scarlett Johansson are held up as ideals of feminine allure. However, the future of the blonde is uncertain. A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.
They're referring, of course, to the story of the WHO Blonde Report, which was
revealed to be a hoax back in 2002. The gene for blonde hair is not actually disappearing, nor did the WHO ever sponsor such a study. Did the Times not realize it was a hoax, or did the reporter slip this in as a joke?
Comments
To be scientific, the reason why men prefer blond women (supposedly) is because fair hair is often the softest, and humans go for prople with soft hair because it suggests that they are free of parasites and desieses.
What a pity that wasn't it. I've always wanted the ability to become invisible at will.
A gene can be in danger of dying out if, say, less than a couple of hundred individuals have it, not when a few hundred million individuals have it.
Also remember that blond hair is generally a recessive trait, which means that (probably) even more people have the gene, without having blond hair, than have the gene and have blond hair. This gets a little dicey because hair color is not controlled by a single gene, but you get the idea.
The Daily Mail/The Mail on Sunday
The Mirror/The Sunday Mirror
The Daily Telegraph/The Sunday Telegraph
The Independent/The Independent on Sunday
and (this is the really strange one)
The Sun/The News of the World.
It's one of those quaint British things that we do to annoy and confuse foreigners ... ; )
Hands off the name Blonde if you're bleached because Blonde means something already; it means the Blonde people.
If you don't care about a tiny genetic minority group being bullied and degraded by a forced association perhaps you might consider how all the little Blonde children feel when they see and hear all the degraded Bleached Brunettes running around oinking and squealing Blonde, Blonder, Blondest.
Oh and by the way blondfrombirth was started by a man and men are Blond, without the 'e'. Women are Blonde with the 'e'.
I know this is a daft question, but is there an objective way of saying whether a person has dark blond or light brown hair?
Because sometimes I hear a girl described as a blond, when her hair just looks brown to me. Then again, I've said that a guy was dark blond, and been told no, his hair is really light brown.
Can anyone provide a photo of someone with dark blond hair and one with light brown hair so I can see what the difference is?