Rebranding Blond Hair

[azdaema]

Thank you, Tywin Lannister, for rebranding blond hair. It really helped me to love my own body. I mean this completely without sarcasm.

Hair colors have different stereotypes attached to them—the intelligent brunette, the fiery redhead, mysterious black hair. For all my logically knowing that stuff is bullshit, I've come to realize these archetypes have more impact on me than I once credited them with.

My hair is blond in the way that could be reasonably expected as the natural hair color of a non-Nordic adult. It's darker now than it was when I was a child, but still what I would broadly consider "blond"—certainly more blond than brunette. Dirty blond or honey blond, depending on the lighting.

I never liked my hair color when I was younger. It wasn't until I first started watching Game of Thrones that changed.

Whether it's framed as "dumb blond" or "blonds have more fun," the recurring theme in traditional stereotypes is that blonds as vapid.

The Lannisters heavily associated blond hair with a very different set of traits—proud, ambitious, intelligent, and ruthless. While this does not really describe me any more than the first set does, this interests me. This is, in some ways, what I aspire to, or how I occasionally enjoy imagining myself to be. In contrast, the classic stereotypes have no relationship or bearing to me whatsoever.

The classic ideas about blond hair typically hold that it is pretty. The other stereotypes—empty-headed, social butterfly, promiscuous—stem from there. And yet, I never convincingly believed that my hair color was beautiful. "Your hair has little melanin (and that's good, because melanin is bad)," is pretty hollow reasoning, and being praised by racist undertones certainly does nothing to boost one's self-image.

Conversely, while the Lannisters are certainly seen as beautiful, A Song of Ice and Fire does not use the traditional framing of blond hair. With the Lannisters, their golden hair is constantly linked to the gold mined from the Westerlands. Their hair is beautiful not because it is pale, but because it resembles mineral wealth. That is a far more compelling argument. Realizing that my hair does look awfully metallic in the sunlight was a real turning point in my view of my own hair.

I don't like to think myself so impacted by stereotypes. Still, it's not terribly surprising. When framed as "the stories we tell about something mean more than the physical reality of that thing," it is the kind of idea I'm usually receptive to. Being given a new story or conceptualization by someone else, and that then ushering in a new way of viewing myself—but of course.

Thank you, Tywin Lannister, for showing me a lens through which to see my hair as having gravitas.