You might think that with sex icons like Rihanna, Beyonce and Adriana Lima, brunettes finally were having their time in the sun.
But apparently, dudes still prefer blondes.
In fact, they believe women with blonde hair to be ‘significantly’ younger and healthier-looking than those of us with darker dos.
Researchers from Augsburg University, Minnesota, showed 110 men computer-generated images of women with blonde, brown or black hair.
They found that men rated women with lighter hair as being more attractive and having greater relationship potential than those with black hair.
There wasn’t much difference between blondes and brunettes for those measures but when men saw pictures of women from the shoulders up, blondes were ranked as being significantly younger looking and healthier than brunettes.
But when it came to long-term relationships, men were more likely to pick brunettes to be the mother of their children, while they judged blonde women to be more promiscuous.
*Sigh*.
‘The male participants were able to make judgments (somewhat complex and clearly meaningful) based on a brief examination of the images … for a variety of reasons, including the link between blonde hair and perceptions of promiscuity, it might be that men are slightly more likely to prefer blonde women as dates and brown-haired women as mates,’ the report concludes.
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Apparently, there might actually be an evolutionary reason for this blonde bias.
Back in the cavemen era, hair colour was used to determine potential partners – and as hair tends to darken with age, the lighter the hair, the younger and more fertile women would have been deemed.
But it seems more likely that blondes have been pushed in pop culture to be kind of sex symbols, often at the exclusion of ethnic minorities or more swarthy women.
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