to ask what is so special about blond hair

[pocpocpoc]

My husband is white and English, I am not white and foreign. I have dark hair and my genetics pretty much guarantee that my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are almost 100% likely to have dark hair too.

DH's brother is married to a white English woman and their daughter is the same age as DD. She is taller than DD and has blond hair. Both are nice young ladies, reasonably attractive, but in different ways.

Something that bothered me for a long time, but I could only put a finger on recently, is how MIL (and others in the family) talk about DD's cousin's blond hair and height, almost as a counter-point to anything DD does that is of mention. For instance: "Well done for getting 12 A* GCSEs (saving a child from fire, winning Olympics, getting a Nobel prize), so proud of you being so academic/brave/athletic/hard-working and also of your cousin, who is a tall blond". I find it strange that DD is typically praised for something she has done and worked hard for, while her cousin is praised only for her looks.

Where it is getting ridiculous is that I noticed DH's sister doing the same thing, this time with our boys. Not long ago she said to me "aren't you lucky that your son has such a good friend to play with, with his beautiful head of blond hair" - the sentence really didn't make sense to me. Thinking back I realised that the blond hair has been brought up every time we met in the last couple of years.

In my culture we don't attribute any special value to blond hair. It is very rare, usually means that the blond person is of another ethnicity. Some people get their hair bleached, but it does not confer any superiority or praise. So help me to understand: what is so special about blond hair? AIBU to be bothered? AIBU to detect a hint of racism?

This does not stop SIL going on and on about DN's blonde hair. Telling me DS is lucky to have a blonde cousin! Honestly, I see it as a code for "he is white

I understand. In a similar vein, its like colourism. My mil has lots of gc, who she's barely interested in. My dc is the lightest skinned out of them all. Despite having no interest in her, she asked us for endless photos of her when she went back to her home country to show to her family and friends.

@BungleandGeorge

But you are making a good point: if DD and I dyed our hair we would be unlikely to get any compliments because we don’t have the facial features or complexion to go with it. So it is about the overall “white” look rather than the hair colour.

As for jealousy, there is none. Why would we be jealous when we have a whole country back home who find our hair attractive (plus DH and countless others)

I don’t know I think a lot of ginger children get compliments from adults, I don’t have ginger children so I’m not sure. I love ginger hair personally.

The playground is different story unfortunately.

[quote pocpocpoc]@BungleandGeorge

But you are making a good point: if DD and I dyed our hair we would be unlikely to get any compliments because we don’t have the facial features or complexion to go with it. So it is about the overall “white” look rather than the hair colour.

As for jealousy, there is none. Why would we be jealous when we have a whole country back home who find our hair attractive (plus DH and countless others)[/quote]
You're not quite getting the reaction you thought you would are you ? Hence the ramping up all the time .

Because it's unusual and stands out. It's also a youthfulness thing. Few people past their mid-teens are really blond naturally--it darkens as you get older, so I think it symbolizes youth in many cultures.

I remember when I was in Melanesia, you used to get a lot of kids with blond or red hair (really blond/red--it was so striking). It darkened to deep brown or black as they got into their teens, but a lot of women there would use a little hair colorant to put in blond highlights, same as many white women who were blond as children. I guess many of us feel a little nostalgic about that bright color.

You're not quite getting the reaction you thought you would are you ? Hence the ramping up all the time .

Quite the opposite. I am learning a lot. I had no idea there were so many layers...

[quote pocpocpoc]@BungleandGeorge

But you are making a good point: if DD and I dyed our hair we would be unlikely to get any compliments because we don’t have the facial features or complexion to go with it. So it is about the overall “white” look rather than the hair colour.

As for jealousy, there is none. Why would we be jealous when we have a whole country back home who find our hair attractive (plus DH and countless others)[/quote]
Well there are certainly many black and Asian women who look fabulous bleach blonde and receive many compliments. It doesn’t suit everyone, the same can be said with any colour. As for white skin no it’s not seen as attractive hence fake tan and sunbeds, comments about ‘glaring’ white legs and many others. If you had experienced having ginger hair, freckles and white skin perhaps you’d think differently. There’s as many preferences for different physical attributes as there are people in the world. If you’re not jealous and the brunettes in the family are better looking anyway I don’t know why it’s upsetting you so much? Perhaps you MIL finds it difficult to praise other things about your niece. People do sometimes have a habit of pigeon holing ‘the attractive one’, ‘the smart one’ etc

@pocpocpoc if you believe it to be race related then you are the best judge of that, never deny that voice which tells you something isn't just about what it might appear to be on the surface. There are a million things throughout my life which I can now see clearly had to do with my 'appearance' such as being told I had to wear my black curly hair up although my straight haired, blonde colleague could wear hers down. Hairdressers making comments about 'do you not brush it?' Someone telling me to get these 'really great straighteners' even though I'm quite open about liking my hair natural.
Hair matters.

@Suspicioussam

Blonde hair is on kids can be so beautiful and striking. Natural blonde shiny hair is rare in adults in this country, it's usually mousy or bleached.

I'm surprised you come from a culture where it is rare but noone makes a fuss. I was very blonde as a child/teen and every country I went to where blonde hair was very uncommon made a HUGE fuss, way more so than here, to the point of being quite intimidating actually.

No it's not, you're assuming its bleached (for some reason). My 19 year old dd and two of her friends have natural blonde hair but people often assume it's dyed because blonde hair is apparently so rare - it's not that rare in the UK as it happens. Even the hairdresser asked dd if she dyed her hair

Just googled it, 29% of Brits have natural blonde hair - hardly vanishingly rare

Imagine how confusing it is for DCs to see such blatant obsession with one feature that almost no one on my side of the family possesses. Should they regard my side of the family as inferior?

But that goes for many families with nothing to do with race. I have one Caucasian blonde haired blue eyed child and my other Caucasian children have brown hair and a mixture of eye colour. When they were young people would literally elbow others out of the way to get to the blond haired one and they had endless positive attention and comments. Their grandparent on DH’s side is blonde so obviously where it came from. I don’t think any of the kids feel my side of the family is inferior as we don’t have any blondes or the potential for blondes!

Will say blonde seems to be a disadvantage for men though. While they get endless positive attention as kids, it doesn’t seem to be seen as ‘manly’ when they are men and my adult son has been ribbed about his ‘girly’ hair as it is blonde. The only positive attention it attracts now is old ladies telling him ‘you look just like an angel’ which is not really what most grown men want to hear. Also not really sure why they think they know what angels look like but anyway …… I always feel like saying ‘are all the ones you know blonde then?’.

My DS used to be very blonde, which is common here in Ireland. Nobody bats an eyelid here but anytime we went on holidays the locals used to fawn over his blonde hair & blue eyes. Even the young children.

It's actually opposite here, I'm very dark featured and don't look Irish - people always comment on that at home. Clearly my DS didn’t take after me lol

I had natural platinum blonde hair until i was early 20s. My grandmother always commented on my neighbours naturally curly hair for being wonderful, and my hair never got a mention.
Only time I noticed it being a problem was in Italy where I was followed by random men, very creepy.
I have blonde hair and brown eyes which is rare and I think that confuses people
My children have dark hair and people comment on that for being attractive. I’ve dyed my hair brown over the years because I prefer it to match my eye colour.
Then there are the creeps that commented about what colour pubes I might have based on platinum hair.

A friend of mine and his wife were divorcing and he told us that her relatives were amazed. I said “well, no-one really knows what goes on in a marriage”, and he said “no, it’s not that, it’s because of her long blonde hair.”

I beg your pardon?!

He said that they all thought (him included) that if you had blonde hair your life was blessed because you had the best of all possible hairs. Even he was surprised they were miserable, because as she was blonde, how could he not adore her?

I’m dark haired, pale skinned. I was both baffled & mildly insulted.

I don’t get the fixation either.

Half my families blonde and I'm jet black haired. I hate blonde hair actually but it's because my sibling used to molt everywhere and I'd always find long blonde hairs on me.

Any other blondes get called Timotei after the advert with the blonde woman in it? It was a naff chat up line used by men, circa mid 90s.

My sister was blonde and I had brown hair. When we grew up, one day she said, "You're the one who is beautiful, not me." We were looking in the mirror together at the time. I was so surprised that she said that, because she had always been so popular and she had blonde hair. But I saw what she saw. That my brown hair was actually actually very nice. The dark color was rich and subtle. I didn't have this prejudice when it came to people outside of my family. I thought people of other races and hues could be very beautiful. But within my own family I had learned a strange message of blonde is best.

I am very blonde and very pale-skinned, and have definitely been the subject of a lot more jokes than praise for it over the years. Even my hairdresser told me in my 20s that my hair was a stupid colour because it was too blonde. So I don't suppose that blondness is universally revered.

My DS is extremely fair. When he was a baby his skin looked almost blue. It wasn't an issue when we lived in the UK, but now we live in Asia, if we leave our city and he has people constantly taking photos of him or touching his hair. One woman last month even screamed when she saw him, and grabbed him for her TikTok.

My son is fair with blue eyes. It’s not particularly unusual in Australia although he does get positive comments in general about it.
However, when we travel through Abu Dhabi on our way back to the U.K. he is utterly fawned over by men and women. He pretends to be embarrassed but secretly loves it.
What’s funny though is that he associates blonde hair with movie villains because I think films and tv have moved so far away from the blonde as the hero/heroine trope. So he cites Malfoy, the prince from Frozen, Luke from Percy Jackson etc as why people see blonde as bad!

I have dark hair, eyes and skin (and was bullied as a kid because of that, called all sort of horrible names in the playground…). However all my children are blond, fair skinned with light blue eyes (taken after my DH and mum). I must have been asked hundred times if I was the nanny/aupair at nursery, school, GP surgery, shops…

My last DD is a slim tall blond, she’s got a lovely cousin of exactly the same age with darker features and a bit shorter/chubbier and I was very embarrassed at the last family function in front of SIL/BIL as people kept commenting on my DD’s looks. It is so sad to see how superficial some people are

If blonde hair is so popular because it's so rare, why dosent the same apply to red heads which IMO are much more striking and unusual

Antisemitism.

In the UK / Ireland we are quite used to seeing redheads but in most of the world red heads are typically Jewish.

I work in a school and I make a point of never commenting on a child’s looks. I have noticed other adults do often comment on blonde hair though.

In my family, we’re all olive skinned with dark hair. My parents are both British (they’ve both researched their family trees back about 300 years and no relative seems to have come from anywhere further afield). Yet, I have always been asked, ‘But where are you from?’ as if I might be hiding something. When I met MIL for the first time, she spent ages musing about why I might be so dark, eventually deciding something bizarre like the Moorish people sailed up the west coast of Britain in 600AD and I was probably descended from them. I found it so strange that she even gave it the headspace.

Interestingly, she’s just had her first grandchild from SIL who is very blonde and it’s mentioned ALL THE TIME. My only thoughts on the colouring of her family is that I wish (mousie haired) DH could spend more than five minutes in the sun without burning/complaining.

I have a friend who has a mane of blonde hair which she is very proud of. It is lovely, but she brings it up all the time. I never feel the need to comment on my own hair. She even once said in our single early twenties that it was good going on a night out with me because we’d never fight over the same man because they’d either only fancy her or me because we looked so different. Eh?!

For what it’s worth though, I was in three Nativities as a child and I was the main speaking part in each one, always dressed as an angel. That probably had more to do with the fact that I was the loudest child in the room than my hair colour though.

I think it changes with the era. In the nineteenth century, the grandparents, mothers-in-law, alpha mater types would praise dimples. In 'A Christmas Carol', Fred's wife has got lots of 'dots' around her cheeks, meaning dimples. Same goes for Jane Austen characters: ' ...and the other sister has dimples!' is a line I remember.

I think the fashion industry has created this vogue for slim and blonde. The fashion industry and the camera goes for strong contrasts: looks are called 'edgy': very high cheekbones, very long legs. The fashion industry goes for a very slim look. Very light and a tan is a strong contrast. They like a 'not trying too hard' look - so the youthful outdoorsy image is popular. I think this particularly because in nineteenth century novels, hair colouring wasn't even distinguished as blonde: it was normally referred to as 'fair' colouring, with no distinction as to whether this meant blonde, golden or light brown.

I think it is the camera which has created this favouring of blonde, as oppose to fair, and the need to stand out for advertising. Grannies probably belong to the era when blonde film stars were cool. It will be different in twenty years time.

As people say, blonde hair darkens, so it's association is with teenage girls. Perhaps silly older relatives like to think of their grandchildren staying kids forever.

I definitely think you could ask your husband to have a word. Cousins should be treated equally.

Red heads are typically Jewish? I never knew that!

I think I was once told there have been studies showing that young children in school are more likely to want to play with girls with long blond hair over other children. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do think many people think blond curly hair with a light tan is particularly attractive look. For some reason people seem not to like redheads with pale skin. Is is a current fashion trend, or some sort of racism, or biologically reproducing with blondes is good for the human race?

I'm naturally dark and once went to a fancy dress party with a blond wig. I got a lot more attention than I usually would and could see where the "blondes have more fun" saying comes from.

But OP, I suspect your niece isn't as academic/talented as your DD which would explain the comments about her looks.