Lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what color my hair is. I’m not online dating — these questions come from people I actually know.
Usually I say brown, because that seems closest (though it looks a bit browner here than in real life). But several of my friends think this is inaccurate, proposing variations that range from strawberry blonde to the apparently stigmatized ginger. I wasn’t totally sure what to put on my drivers’ license, and I’m not at all clear on how I should interpret a new and kind of specious British study on hair color, work, and sex.
If I’m in fact a brunette, apparently 62% of people think I look more professional in the workplace. I’m pretty safely not a blonde, so I probably don’t need to go “brunette to appear more intelligent in the office,” as 31% of blondes surveyed apparently have done. I don’t feel that my hair color has held me back at work, though apparently 38% of “fair-haired women” do (and it’s unclear from the article whether “fair-haired” is just a synonym for blonde, reinforcing the point some commenters here have made about the annoying vagueness of science journalism). Another 38% of women who have changed their hair color feel that it made their bosses take them more seriously — I’m not sure if those are good odds or not.
If I’m a redhead, I get to have more sex — three times a week, as opposed to twice for brunettes. As a brunette I’d have the lowest odds of a one-night stand, and if I were blonde I’d be more likely to have sex in a field or on a train (no word on who likes it in a boat with a goat). All this is cast into serious doubt by the sponsor of the study — Superdrug, a British drugstore chain which features hair care products prominently on its website. In light of this, all the stats above kind of look like a ploy to sell hair dye to recessionistas worried about their jobs.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of what to call my hair. What do you, the viewers at home, think? And for those of you also blessed with in-between hair, what do you call it?
Blondes Copy Scarlett Johansson In Dying Hair Brown To Be Taken Seriously [Telegraph]