“The hair dye must be getting to your head.”
“That’s your blonde moment for the day.”
“Sorry, she’s blonde.”
These are some of the comments I’ve heard since I dyed my hair blonde. Well, actually…I bleached it. Yes, my hair is bleach blonde, but that does not mean that I am stupid.
The first time someone made a blonde joke to me, I stood there puzzled for a moment because I’d forgotten I dyed it! I then laughed it off and went about my business, but by the third or fourth joke, I started to wonder when hair color became an indication of someone’s intelligence level.
Maybe it’s because of movies like Mean Girls where both Karen and Regina are a little airheaded. Maybe Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie coined the term through their ventures on The Simple Life.
Then there’s Elle Woods. MOVIE SPOLIER ALERT: The classic Legally Blonde character destroys all stereotypes when she solves a court case because of knowledge of the hair dying process.
I’d like to think of myself as Elle Woods: a driven young girl doing her best to make it in her field of study. My hair color has nothing to do with my motivation level, drive or work ethic. If anything, it makes me want to work even harder.
What I think of as the most important part of my hair transformation is the way I feel like I can take on the world. I know, it sounds cliché, but there’s something about drastically changing your appearance that makes you feel like a heroine. As an entertainment journalist, I feel that my new look gives me an identity to go along with my work. For the first time ever, I feel like I would be taken seriously if I walked into my dream workplace at MTV or E! News.
Being a blonde has given me so much more self-confidence. Every day I get to experiment with new lipstick colors and find myself an outfit that doesn’t make me appear too yellow. Being a blonde is a statement in itself and automatically makes any outfit look ten times cooler. I am aware of that and I love waking up every morning to try something different.
Now onto the intelligence thing I was talking about. I did some research on the “dumb blonde” phrase, and found that white women who said their natural hair color was blonde had an average IQ score within 3 points of brunettes and those with red or black hair. This information comes from Jay Zagorsky, author of the study and a research scientist at The Ohio State University. Shoutout to those natural blondies.
I am not going to sit here and talk about my GPA, how hard I study or whatever any other college kid would say, but I will say this: I can guarantee my high school diploma and 30+ college credit hours did not vanish in the hour it took to transform my image. I’m still the same person on the inside and so are my brains. So next time you’re thinking about making a blonde joke, think about that person as whole rather than the pigment in her hair.