The Toxic Obsession with Blonde Hair
Why we need to stop bleaching and/or dyeing our hair ... and should grow out our "spiritual antenna".
This essay was updated on October 9, 2025 to add some corrections and clarifications (in italics) and to remove some personal information. The rest of the text is the same.
For more on this, I was on
’s podcast — which you can listen to here.
I also discussed this topic on
’s podcast —
And now, on to the (revised) essay —
“I see so many beautiful, blonde-haired girls. So many beautiful blonde-haired girls walking around everywhere. In your revealing shorts. Your cascading blonde hair. Your pretty faces. And I want one for a girlfriend.”
— Elliot Rodger, Santa Barbara Shooter
This was originally intended to be a lighter piece.
But then I saw the video of the horrific stabbing of Iryna Zarutska.
Many commentators assume the murder was racially motivated. While I’ve seen people claim that her killer, Decarlos Brown, muttered “I got the white girl”, I have not seen or heard any video or audio to confirm this.
But it occurred to me; Brown, sitting behind Zarutska, would not have been looking at her face, or even seen much of her skin.
He would have been looking at her blonde hair.
I’m obviously speculating and projecting — Brown was a paranoid schizophrenic with a criminal history, and in interview tapes after his arrest he can be heard telling his sister that a “material” in his body compelled him to attack Zarutska. (“They just lashed out on her, that’s what happened. Whoever was working the materials, they lashed out on her. That’s all there is to it. Now they really gotta investigate what my body was exposed to … Now they gotta do an investigation as to who was the motive behind what happened.”)
There’s no evidence he was motivated specifically by her hair, and the tapes with his sister suggest he may not have been consciously motivated by her race either — but the fact that Zarutska was the only white person, the only blonde, in the train car makes it difficult to dismiss her physical appearance as irrelevant.
Shortly after I started Googling Zarutska’s murder, the Instagram algorithm offered up other stories of black men killing white women.
I couldn’t help but notice that the victims had more in common than just their race.
I was triggered. I have long blonde hair. Both of my daughters are blonde. It is too easy — in that reactive, emotional way — for me to imagine myself or one of my daughters in Zarutska’s place.
Of course, this could be coincidence or algorithmic deception. While natural blonde hair like mine is rare (around 2% of the world population, 2%-5% of Americans), and even rarer in adulthood, bleached and dyed blonde hair is very common — around 20% of American women dye their hair blonde at some point in their lives, and blonde is the most common hair-dye choice worldwide. There’s some overlap between the “natural” and “bleached” blondes, as it is not uncommon for women with dark or dirty blonde hair to add highlights.
There’s a lot of “blondes” out there. So it could be a coincidence. If there are a lot of black people going around hating blonde women, I’ve never experienced this. Personally, I’ve never been attacked, sexually assaulted, or even threatened by a black man. I’ve been hit on and catcalled by a few black guys, but in what I’d describe as a friendly (often funny, sometimes nerdy), and completely non-threatening way. I can also only recall one incident where a black guy insulted me (he called me a “whore” while I walked past him). The last time a black guy yelled at me was last year, and he shouted “Congrats on your pregnancy!”, which is just nice. These experiences span Canada, several US cities, and a long trip to South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe several years ago.
I’ve also had a handful of black female friends over the years — in three cases, they decided to be friends with me. (I went to New York with one of these friends, and we ended up in a nightclub where I was the only non-black person in the whole building. No one gave me so much as a dirty look, and that was actually one of the only times I can remember going to a nightclub in my early twenties and NOT having my ass grabbed).
All in all, my personal experience is that black people do not seem to have any sort of instinctive hate-on for women with naturally blonde hair; if anything, being a natural blonde has given me something to bond with black people over as we both have had to deal with a lot of unwanted hair-touching. My husband is also a natural blonde and plays reggae and dancehall music with a bunch of black guys, and he says he’s received exactly zero flack from them — or anyone else — about his hair.
And here’s where I have to make another uncomfortable observation. While I cannot be sure — it’s difficult to tell from photos — I suspect none of the murder victims pictured above are naturally blonde.
Over the years, I’ve had several men say something to me along the lines of “I normally hate blondes, but you’re okay because your hair is real.”
Because here’s the thing — the vitriol against blonde women is (at least almost) exclusively against bleached blondes. The same applies to negative blonde stereotypes, like the “dumb blonde” or the association with slutty behaviour.
And while it should go without saying that harming someone because they bleach or dye their hair is horrific and completely unacceptable, it is not a form of bigotry to dislike people who choose to bleach and dye their hair blonde, because it is not a form of bigotry to judge someone for their decisions.
It would be a form of prejudice if people hated or made negative assumptions about people for being naturally blonde, but this has also literally never happened to me and I am not aware of this being a widespread issue.
A Brief History of Blonde Hair
According to researchers, blonde hair evolved independently at least twice — around 17,000-18,000 years ago in the Ancient Northern Eurasians (ANE) in Siberia, and between 5,000 and 30,000 years ago in Melanesia (with the highest concentration of natural blondes now appearing in the Solomon Islands).
That’s right — the first blondes might have been black!
The ANE did not have blue eyes — blue eyes first appeared later, between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago around the Black Sea region in the Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG).
Both the ANE and the WHG had darker skin than modern Europeans. The blonde hair, blue eyes, and light skin combination that so many people would become obsessed with likely first came together in the Corded Ware culture during the Bronze Age as the descendants of the ANE and WHG merged with Anatolian Early European farmers (EEF). However, not all Corded Ware people would have had all three traits — a monolithic blue-eyed, blonde, light-skinned people has never existed.
Scientists are still learning about the genetics of hair colour, including blonde hair. Researchers have found around 200 genetic differences between European brunettes and blondes, which in turn interact with environmental factors to produce a wide range of colours.
I spent some time looking up the genetics of blonde hair, and I found the research contradicting and confusing. The truth is, I don’t think scientists really fully understand all the factors that give someone blonde hair — my BS detector has been going off. Big time.
So is what I wrote above the true story of blonde hair? I kind of doubt it.
We evolve. Every human is unique. Genetic mutations happen all the time, in individuals and across populations. Blondes are born to two parents with dark hair all the time — my mother has dark hair, while my father and his sisters were blonde (before going grey), but I ended up far blonder than anyone else on his side of the family. Why? I’m not sure. I had a serious head injury from falling off a staircase when I was one, maybe — as family and friends have joked — the knock on the head made me blonder.
Genes and environmental factors shift probabilities. There is always a degree of chaos, randomness.
Many children are born with dark hair which turns blonde in the first year of their life. This was the case with me and both of my daughters. I suspect this is because we have a lot of genes that cause photobleaching, i.e. the sun bleaches our hair blonde. We all went blonde early into our first summer as we started spending more time outside in the sun.
With photobleaching, ultraviolet (UV) rays break down the melanin molecules in hair, causing them to lose their colour. UV rays oxidize and degrade these pigment molecules.
Natural blonde hair is almost always the result of photobleaching. This is how my hair works. It grows in dark blonde and then the sun bleaches it. My husband’s hair grows in light brown, but the sun will give his Jew-fro all sorts of crazy white-blonde lightning-like streaks.
While there are people with pale skin and naturally blonde hair out there, the whole photobleaching thing is why blonde children (and adults) will often have sun-kissed, tanned skin, not pale skin.
While blonde hair is associated with Europeans, natural blonde hair is possible in any race, and there are Middle Easterners, Latinos, black people (see above!), and mixed-race people with natural blonde hair (I’m not sure about people who are fully Asian, but someone commented on one of my notes to say that there are apparently some rare Japanese people out there with sun-kissed blondish hair).
Blonde hair has always been obsessed over and treated as special or magical. Helen of Troy is usually depicted as a blonde (and was allegedly the daughter of Zeus). And for three of the four blonde Disney princesses, their blonde hair is literally part of their magic (and their traumatic backstory). Sleeping Beauty is gifted blonde hair by the fairy who blesses her with beauty. Rapunzel’s hair is blonde because of her hair’s healing powers from her mother drinking the tea made with the magic flower — and when it’s cut off at the end of the movie, it turns brown and loses its magic. Elsa’s white-blonde hair is implied to be connected to her ice-magic, and when she accidentally strikes her sister with an icicle, Anna’s hair starts to turn white-blonde too. The sole exception to this pattern is Cinderella, and she has the darkest blonde hair of the four princesses.
The first synthetic hair dye and the foundational chemical for modern hair bleaching and dyeing, paraphenylenediamine, was accidentally invented in the mid-1800s by a teenage chemistry wiz.
“[B]y the 1800’s chemists had discovered that hydrogen peroxide would bleach hair without burning the scalp. In 1907 the French chemist Eugène Schueller created the first commercial hair lightener, Aureole, later to become the global brand leader L’Oreal. Thanks to Lawrence Gelb, the founder of Clairol, the 1950’s saw the development of a one-step hair dye that could lighten hair without bleaching it which allowed women to lighten their own hair at home.”
— Jo Fuller, “The History of Highlights”
It’s now estimated that around 70% of American, European, and Japanese women bleach and/or dye their hair. The global hair dye market is currently estimated at over 20 billion USD per year, while the hair bleach industry is estimated at around 3.5 billion USD.
Famous Blondes Are (Mostly) Fake
The first famous “blonde bombshell” was movie star Jean Harlow. Harlow claimed throughout her career to be a natural blonde, but was outed by her hairdresser.
“We used peroxide, ammonia, Clorox, and Lux flakes! Can you believe that?”
— Alfred Pagano, Jean Harlow’s hairdresser
Harlow’s vanity cost her her beauty — her hair began falling out in her twenties — and eventually her life. She died of kidney failure as a result of the poisons in her hair at age twenty-six.
“Thousands upon thousands of women attempted DIY versions of Jean’s famous platinum dye recipe, with sales of bleach and ammonia sky rocketing.”
— F Yeah History, “The Horrifying History of Hair Dye”
In Harlow’s day, women often “left the beauty shop with violent headaches, swollen eyelids and blisters on their foreheads.”
See this recent story about a twenty-year-old Chinese woman who was hospitalized with kidney disease after dyeing her hair every month. Chronic kidney disease has been increasing in prevalence for decades, and as many as 1/7 Americans may have it, as well as 850 million people worldwide. (No, hair dyes are not the only cause).
See also this story about the high rates of cancer among hairdressers due to regular exposure to hair dyes. ““We’re not talking about chemicals in hair dyes that might be carcinogenic or possibly carcinogenic. These are known chemicals that cause cancer,” [a lawyer] said.”
I couldn’t find any reliable information on this, but I strongly suspect that the popularity of hair bleach in the 1930s was one of many contributing factors to the insanity that was Nazi Germany. Many German Jews also bleached their hair to try to “pass” as Aryan and escape persecution.
Almost all famous Hollywood blondes are bottle blondes.
In a bizarre twist, many celebrities who are naturally blonde actually dye their hair darker colours and are not famous for being blonde (e.g. Elvis Presley, Angelina Jolie, Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence).
One of the reasons for this is that natural blonde hair in adults tends to be on the darker side (“dirty blonde”) and is not particularly photogenic compared to bleached blonde hair.
Natural blonde hair can look brown in dark lighting. Bleached blonde hair has a much more consistent bright colour and looks better in photographs and on video than natural blonde hair.
In a podcast with
, he asked me if one of the reasons I wrote about this topic is because I’m guarding my territory (so to speak). I replied that my concern was that the hair products used to mimic straight blonde hair are toxic — however, upon further reflection, I am actually annoyed at bottle blondes. I’m annoyed that women fake blonde hair in order to advertise sexual availability or to sell sex (whether as a movie starlet or as a literal sex worker).I do understand that many women choose to do this out of financial need, or a desire for love, fame, and power — and I don’t necessarily fault women for doing this, but I also wish that talented women like Dolly Parton, Sydney Sweeney, Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe, Reese Witherspoon (etc) were able to be so high-achieving and desirable in Hollywood with their natural hair colours.
But I suspect one of the reasons I got my ass grabbed so much in bars when I was young is that bottles blondes are more likely to smile or giggle and considerably less likely to hit a guy who does that. It is, in fact, annoying that so many women “appropriate” my natural hair colour to sell sex.
The Myth of the “Dumb Blonde”
“I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb … and I also know that I’m not blonde.”
— Dolly Parton
“The biggest misconception about me is that I’m just a dumb blond with big tits. I’m naturally brunette.”
— Sydney Sweeney
While funny, the two quotes above completely miss the point about “dumb blonde” stereotypes. Most people who make “dumb blonde” jokes are not talking about natural blondes, they are talking about bottle blondes.
(That being said, while I couldn’t find evidence that the first infamous “dumb blonde” — the French courtesan Catherine-Rosalie Gerard Duthé (1748-1830 AD) — bleached her hair, it was common for sex workers to lighten their hair — blonde hair was a signal a woman was selling sex — with everything from ashes to pigeon shit to urine).
Now, if there are any detrimental effects to IQ from bleach and hair dye, it’s probably not a huge effect size. Parton and Sweeney and other famous fake-blondes are clearly not stupid, but actually quite smart. They pretend to be “dumb blondes” because it’s funny and they want/ed to get rich selling sex and a stereotype with a fake version of blonde hair. This is a smart strategy, and it’s one of the reasons Parton is a billionaire, Marilyn Monroe is still one of the most famous actresses of all time, and Sweeney just bought a $13.5 million-dollar mansion in Florida.
Here’s another natural blonde weighing in on this phenomenon in a biting op-ed in The Daily Mail:
“How infuriating to discover that a bright little spark like Mariella Frostrup has joined the chorus of celebrities bleating on about not being taken seriously ... because they’re blonde.
As the only woman I know who has made it into her 40s with a natural head of golden locks, it’s very maddening to read about bottle-blondes whose only wish is that people would see beyond the (unnatural) colour of their hair.
It may take a true blonde to figure this out, but it is a problem easily remedied for women like Mariella: if you don’t like being blonde, give up the bleach.
But, of course, women like her don’t want to go natural and disappear back into their mousey-holes.
They love their blonde locks too much for that, so they blame everyone but themselves for their predicament.
Small wonder, then, that they get a reputation for being a bit lacking in grey matter (brain cells, that is, not their all-too-obvious roots).
Indeed, if dyed blondes spent less time worrying about their tresses and how many more highlights they can handle before their hair falls out in clumps, then perhaps they wouldn’t be considered so dumb in the first place.”
— Helen Carroll, “The only dumb blondes I've met are the peroxide ones like you, Mariella!”, The Daily Mail, 2010
Hilariously, it may be that natural blondes are, on average, a little smarter than brunettes and redheads (controlling for race). One study found that blonde women had an average IQ of 103.2, compared to 102.7 for those with brown hair, 101.2 for those with red hair and 100.5 for those with black hair. Furthermore, “[b]londe women were slightly more likely to be in the highest IQ category than those with other hair colours, and slightly less likely to be in the lowest IQ category.”
Now, I suspect the gap is underestimated in these studies because there’s probably quite a few bottle-blondes ticking the “blonde” box and dragging the average blonde IQ down.
From the study, lo and behold:
“Zagorsky noted that more women than expected in the NLSY79 reported that they were blonde. In the survey, 20.7 percent of white women reported being blonde, compared to only 17.1 percent of men. Assuming that hair color is not related to gender and that men were less likely to color their hair, Zagorsky said the results suggest that about 3.5 percent of women reported their natural hair color as blonde when it was not.”
As it turns out, several studies have found that girls/women are significantly more likely to be naturally blonde than boys/men! Related, as it turns out, Caucasian blonde women have higher estrogen levels on average than women with other hair colours. Blonde hair is both feminine and child-coded.
As well, it’s worth noting that the above study used a very young sample size (ages 14-20 when the study was launched). I’ll return to this point in an edit later in the essay.
Interestingly, the study found that blondes were more likely to grow up in homes with a lot of books.
Now, I have a theory as to why this might be (besides those natural blondes being naturally bookish, which may also be true, I certainly was), which brings me to the next section …
Blonde Hair is Elite-Coded
Fake blonde hair is obviously elite-coded because maintaining a head of bleached-blonde hair is time-consuming, expensive, vain, and frivolous.
Women with well-done fake blonde hair go to the hairdresser every 4 to 10 weeks, with the intense platinum blonde look requiring more frequent visits than more subtle highlights. Overall, maintaining bleached blonde hair can cost between $2,000 - $8,000 per year.
The other way to get fake blonde hair is to buy a wig. A really good blonde wig typically sells in the low four-figure range, but apparently can cost as much as $10,000 — like the wig Rachel McAdams wore for Mean Girls.
Rich people wearing blonde wigs goes back thousands of years. Wealthy Roman women would harvest the hair of their blonde (usually Germanic) slaves to make blonde wigs. And then there’s this infamous style, a must-have for Georgian elites:
Obviously, natural blonde hair doesn’t require spending thousands of dollars on chemicals at the hairdresser or buying fancy wigs. I go get a haircut about once per year and the only other hair products I buy are my crunchy non-toxic rosemary shampoo bars from Kitsch. I do occasionally oil my hair (coconut or black seed oil + essential oils) to repair damage, but I’m not buying any of the oils involved specifically for that reason.
And yet, while I may flex on being low-maintenance, the truth is that natural blonde hair is still elite-coded … and sure enough, I am a rich kid! And I lived in a house full of books! Books are expensive! My parents bought me so many of them, it could probably be classified as a hoarding disorder.
(
, I felt so dragged by that post, why are you so frequently on-point? I was definitely eating real Parmigiano Reggiano from the expensive Italian deli as a kid — speaking of frivolous, my mom once accused me of eating at $8 worth of cheese every time I had pasta.)Anyway, the reason for this is simple. It’s the photobleaching — blonde hair as a result of lots of sun exposure.
Back when working people spent most of their days outside, natural blonde hair was associated with farm girls, Germanic barbarians, and Northwestern European slaves taken by the Roman Empire (etc).
Today, it’s often a sign of privilege to be able to spend lots of time in the sun. It is also, quite obviously, a privilege to be able to fly somewhere hot and sunny for vacation during the dreary winter months. The many vacations I’ve been taken on to Mexico and Hawaii probably have a lot to do with my year-round golden hair, as does being a stay-at-home mom with a nice backyard in which I can chill with my kids in the sun all summer.
Are Blonde Genes Actually Great?
As a reminder, Sydney Sweeney and most if not all of the “blondes” dancing in those viral sorority videos are bottle blondes, not real blondes, and if your hair colour comes from a bottle then you do not have “blonde genes” and bragging about your genes being “great” and being praised for “natural beauty” while rocking a face full of make-up and bleached hair is, frankly, quite “dumb.”
Yes, I realize many of the women who bleach their hair or add highlights did have blonde hair when they were younger and do have “blonde genes”, but my point is that if there are chemicals in your hair to lighten it, you are not showing off your “genetic” traits. Blonde hair tends to darken around puberty, and many women start highlighting their hair around then — once you start, it’s very difficult to stop, and many hairdressers have told me that it’s common for hair to grow in darker after bleaching, which is interesting.
But setting all that aside, are blonde genes — real blonde genes — actually great?
Natural blonde hair can certainly be very beautiful — and historically, natural blonde hair was likely sexually selected for over other hair colours — but as I explained above, well-done bleached blonde hair is reasonably seen by many people as more attractive and bottle blonde hair is objectively more photogenic than real blonde hair.
But aesthetics aside, real blonde hair does have an obvious genetic advantage because it reflects light, thus keeping your head cool and protecting you from the sun. The lighter hair colour also allows for greater Vitamin D synthesis in low-sunlight regions. And because naturally blonde hair is very sensitive to lighting, it also looks brown / doesn’t stand out in the dark — an obvious safety advantage — unlike bleached blonde hair which stands out even in poor lighting. Real blonde hair is flexible, adaptable, ever-changing.
Furthermore, the study on IQ and hair colour mentioned earlier suggests that there may be some cognitive advantages associated with blonde hair. Higher Vitamin D levels have been found to be positively associated with general intelligence, so this effect might be (at least partially) explained by natural blondes spending more time in the sun.
I will throw it out there that the natural blondes I know do appear to be on the cleverer side, with this being particularly true of women and men with longer sun-kissed blonde hair.
While the above is true — I can think of several natural blondes I know who scored above 130 on IQ tests, one got above 160!, generally speaking, the natural blondes I know are also underachievers. There are several reasons why this might be — in my conversation with Ancient Problemz, he pointed out that people with high sexual market value due to physical appearance have less drive to be high-achieving — and I’ll return to this point again.
I’ve also observed that the longer-haired natural blondes I know tend to be good-natured and/or good-humoured / easy-going. I cannot provide a scientific explanation for this observation, the best I can offer is a hunch that it makes a kind of poetic sense that blonde hair would help you keep a cool head metaphorically as well as literally — maybe the fair-haired are also a bit more fair-headed? Maybe there’s something to the hair of gold, heart of gold trope?
(What about the Vikings, you might ask? Weren’t they blond and … kind of violent and rapey and terrible? Well, guess what, they also were bleaching their hair with lye soap in order to prevent lice and to achieve that infamous Nordic beauty standard.)
Rethinking this one, it would be more accurate to say that many of the natural blondes I know have some people-pleasing tendencies. As well, it’s worth noting again that the Nazi era arose around the same time that hair bleaching took off, and many Germans were likely bleaching or highlighting their hair. As well, the Nazis wore their hair short, so the observation that longer blonde hair is associated with chillness would not apply (this will make more sense after the next section).
That being said, most of the loveliest humans I know are not blondes — they have black, brown, or red hair, often on the longer side (while the men tend to have beards). And I’ve known many lovely people with dyed hair (and not all dyes are equally toxic, of course).
While I can’t provide an evidence-based argument for this, anecdotally, I’ve noticed that what most blondes seem to have in common is a big desire to be loved — often stemming from a childhood low in oxytocin.
Chronic stress causes our hair to lose melanin, to go white or grey — perhaps maybe it also contributes to blondness?
In addition to the eumelanin and phenomelanin that make up our colouring, humans have another type of melanin in our brains — neuromelanin.
Neuromelanin plays many complex roles in our brains, including clearing toxins.
Maybe when our brains need and use more neuromelanin, it can cause our hair to have less melanin.
Certainly, the four blonde Disney princesses all had traumatic childhoods, and grew up without enough parental love.
This observation is also true of bottle blondes — women who bleach and dye their hair blonde often do so out of a desire to be beautiful, a desire to be loved by men.
“The RushTok videos are a blonde 21-gun salute: tightly executed, explosive, slightly terrifying.”
— Suzy Weiss, “Long Live the Sorority Girl”, The Free Press
Maybe blonde hair is (at least sometimes) a symbol of the insatiable hunger to be loved that comes from not getting enough love as a child.
Maybe natural blonde hair is a sign that the spirit world loves you (Cinderella’s fairy godmother, Sleeping Beauty’s three good fairies, Elsa’s commune with the spirits in Frozen II, Rapunzel’s magic flower). Maybe it signals someone who hasn’t given up on being loved.
Maybe Disney-princess blonde hair tends to come with Disney-princess blonde trauma.
I don’t know.
Maybe.
Maybe blonde hair is a signal of childishness, of high neuroplasticity, a vulnerability to imprinting. Maybe one of the reasons for the “dumb blonde” stereotype is that blondes are often forgetful. They learn quickly, and forget quickly. And, of course, modern hair dyes might also have a negative effect on memory as well.
I’ve noticed that blonde hair seems to be more common among people with diagnoses of autism and/or ADHD, and people with a history of substance use.
Maybe the genes that cause blonde hair are genes that increase sensitivity — to the environment, to love (or lack thereof), to toxins, etc.
Returning to the study on hair colour and IQ, because the sample was so young, it’s possible there is a “gifted child” effect at play if blonde hair is linked to early childhood emotional neglect — see “The Drama of the Gifted Children” — and if the study looked at an older sample the correlation between hair colour and IQ would disappear. Having a lot of books in a house can also be a sign of loneliness as well as affluence — reading is (usually) a solitary activity, and lonely children are more likely to read a lot of books.
However, a 2020 study found that people with darker hair tend to experience puberty earlier than blondes and another study found that blondes may live a little longer on average, which is not what you would expect if the IQ difference was caused by precocity. This points to there actually being some cognitive advantages correlated with natural blondness, likely via genes for higher overall sensitivity (later puberty and a longer lifespan would be associated with higher general intelligence). Genes for sensitivity would increase the likelihood of both positive and negative outcomes, depending on the environment (i.e. is it possible natural blondes are more orchid-like?). See “Relational Autism?”.
It’s understandable that people attach spiritual significance to blonde hair. It’s hair that turns gold in the sun. There’s something magical about that.
Blonde hair definitely gives you an edge in the sun compared to darker hair colours —but you know what other kind of hair is awesome at protecting people from the sun?
That’s right, tightly coiled “nappy” hair offers far better protection from the sun than straight hair, and may even help conserve water!
Given all of this, the people with the greatest hair genes in the world are probably these beautiful folks from the Solomon Islands:
God (Probably) Doesn’t Want You Bleaching Your Hair
Various cultures and wisdom traditions believe that hair carries quite a lot of spiritual significance, storing positive and negative energies, and acting as a spiritual antennae to the universe and a conduit to the gods. This is why spiritual leaders tend to have long, often unruly, hair.
Blonde hair in particular has historically symbolized divinity, enlightenment, purity, nobility, and higher consciousness, drawing connections to the light of the sun and spiritual brilliance — an angelic symbol of the inner light of the soul, associated with the gods.
As regular readers may be aware, I’m inclined to occasionally take some magic mushrooms and sit outside meditating or doing yoga in the sun. And here’s the thing, all of my craziest “talking to God” and insane-healing experiences on psychedelics have happened on sunny days, either after I’ve spent a bunch of time in the sun or while I am sitting in the sun.
I believe there are many fractal levels to what we call God. There is the Creator, the source, who first fractured in the Big Bang. And then there is the Earth’s consciousness, Gaia. Just as human consciousness is made up of billions of bacteria, our gut microbiome, we are all part of the microbiome of Spirit, of Gaia, of Creator, at different fractal levels. Magic mushrooms (and various spiritual practices such as meditation and fasting) can open up the communication channels between fractal levels, allowing us to communicate with our gut microbiome and with Spirit, with God.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think there’s something to this spiritual antenna thing. Not only that, but I actually think blonde hair might be a more effective spiritual antenna than darker hair colours (if for no other reason than it makes it easier to spend more time in the sun).
This could also be because blondes tend to have more hair (and finer, more delicate, easy-to-break hair) than other people!
Similarly, tightly coiled, curly, and nappy hair would obviously (if you understand fractals) make for more effective spiritual antennae than straight hair.
So once again, a blonde afro would theoretically be the greatest antenna to God.
That being said, I suspect the greatest factors in how well your spiritual antenna works is not the colour of your hair or even whether it’s curly or straight — it’s the length (longer hair makes for a better spiritual antenna) and how healthy your hair is, whether it’s contaminated by toxins — like hair bleach and dye.
But here’s the thing, if you believe that blonde hair has spiritual significance, if you believe that blonde hair is maybe a little “better” (however you define that) than other hair colours, then by this logic faking blonde hair with bleach and dye is a sin against God, against Nature, and against your own body — and the bodies of any children you might have or have in the future (because that crap is toxic and linked to the “development of several childhood malignancies in offspring” as well as increased risk of miscarriages and stillbirths).
If blonde hair is a symbol of divinity, then faking blonde hair is faking divinity.
No, I am not suggesting that people who bleach or dye their hair are “bad” people in anyway. Many people who alter their hair colour with chemicals are wonderful people, or at least trying to be good people. But it may interfere with one’s spiritual connection.
I think it should be fairly obvious that God would not want you to pour bleach and dye over your spiritual antenna. (These products may also be contributing to pollution and climate change; however, this does not appear to apply to plant-based hair dye alternatives).
And there are a lot of people out there who claim to speak for God but have a head full of bleach and dye — or are married to women with heads full of bleach and dye.
And how can we trust anything you say when your spiritual antenna is corrupted by vanity — one of the seven deadly sins?
As an aside — remember earlier when I asked why
is so frequently on point? Well, let’s talk a look at Walt …
I suspect this is the reason I kind of like Matt Walsh (despite frequently disagreeing with him) —
But I (usually) cannot stand listening to or looking at Ben Shapiro for more than 10 seconds —
The Cruelty of Our Obsession with Straight, Blonde Hair
Black people are the greatest victims of our toxic beauty industry. I’ve seen a lot of right-wing people online say and write critical things about “black culture” and black people, especially after the murder of Iryna Zarutska. Many of these comments are, frankly, dehumanizing and racist.
Black violence is obviously a problem — Iryna Zarutska was basically a child, she was minding her own business, and she was brutally murdered. And she’s far from the only victim of black violence.
But if you go back a few decades, there wasn’t a widespread problem with black mental illness and violence — even though black people experienced far more oppression and ill treatment. Black men were not randomly going berserk and murdering people. This appears to be a new thing.
And maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons for this is that black people are being poisoned en masse. To be clear, pretty much everyone is being poisoned — by Big Pharma, by processed foods, by air pollution, by a toxic media culture, by the beauty industry (etc) — but maybe black people are a little more affected than everyone else.
One of the reasons for this would be low Vitamin D — a major predictive factor in schizophrenia, autism, and other mental and physical health conditions — as black skin requires more sun exposure for Vitamin D synthesis, and many black people have been duped into wearing sunscreen all the time and/or avoiding the sun.
But I think another reason is the unholy war on natural black hair, and the pressure black women feel to try to conform to “white” beauty standards, leading them to destroy their natural hair with bleaches, dyes, hair relaxers and more. While hair dyes and bleach are safer now than they were in Jean Harlow’s time, these things are still hormone disruptors and can contribute to severe damage to and disruption of the GI system. Women who use a lot of toxic hair products are more likely to have children with a variety of issues.
Studies have found that between 60% to 97% of African-American women use hair relaxers — and this may increase the risk of several cancers as well as early-onset puberty (black girls, on average, go through puberty earlier than other girls). Other studies have found that hair dye use increases the cancer risk for black women more than for white women. Women of colour also spend over 8 billion dollars on (very toxic!) skin-whitening creams worldwide.
“[W]hile bleaching the skin is common, it’s both dangerous and potentially life-threatening because products contain steroids, hydroquinone bleach and mercury. The World Health Organization warns that skin bleaching can cause liver and kidney damage, neurological problems, cancer and, for pregnant women, stillbirth.”
— Ronald E. Hall, “Women of color spend more than $8 billion on bleaching creams worldwide every year”
Is it possible — bear with me — that some mentally-ill, poisoned black men are lashing out at bottle blonde white women because of what their hair represents? Because of the damage the whole “straight blonde hair is the most beautiful” thing has done to black women, physically and psychologically, and via them, to their children who are bombarded with hormone disruptors in the womb?
“Today, I often think back to why I coloured my hair in the first place. Did I really have a choice? If you had asked me why, I might not have been able to put it into all the right words. I’m not sure I’d have been able to tell you what I know now: that I had ingested an insidious message over the course of my childhood and well into the first half of my teenage years. This message pounded inside my head constantly, like a bass line: blond is beautiful. There was no escaping it. On my way to school every day, I looked out the window as the bus zipped down Kingsway. My eyes would catch glimpses of billboards featuring blond, windblown hair, smiling faces, eyes that looked back at me. I swear, I physically felt the message insert itself in my brain and on the insides of my eyelids. I was powerless.”
— Chelene Knight, “How I Learned to Love My Natural Hair”
Don’t try to tell me (or any black women) that this message isn’t real. I’ve had straight blonde hair my whole life and a lot of people are really freaking weird about it. I was also hit with the message that my hair was prettier than other people’s hair (I do not actually think this is true, and I know the author above, and, frankly, she’s beautiful — inside and out — and has beautiful natural hair).
I have a confession.
You remember this old profile picture of mine?
While I am naturally blonde, I’m not 100% naturally blonde in this photo.
There’s bleach in my hair.
Back in early 2019, I had a nervous breakdown and in the middle of that I decided to dye my hair pink. I convinced a hairdresser to do it, but my hair wouldn’t hold dye without adding a little bit of bleach. So he bleached about a third of my hair for about 10 minutes so it would hold the dye.
I only did this once. The pink washed out quickly — what a waste of money! — but, of course, the bleach remained. It mixed in with the rest of my hair pretty well and I grew it out and eventually cut all the bleached parts off a couple of years ago, but for a while, I wasn’t completely a “natural” blonde.
Remember that story from the beginning about the black guy who called me a whore? That happened while I still had the bleach in my hair, in 2021.
That’s right — the only time a black person has ever been abusive to me was when I had bleach in my hair.
I think he knew.
Black women, I don’t know if you want to hear this from me, but I’ll say it anyway. Your natural hair is beautiful. It is your antenna to God, a main source of your spiritual and intellectual powers. Grow it out, wear it proudly, and ignore all the evil jackasses who try to sell you expensive toxins because they insist that straight, blonde hair is the most beautiful. It isn’t.
Just remember, the hair (most) people are obsessed with is not natural blonde hair, but bottle-blonde hair — the pale, white, blue-eyed, “blonde” “beauty standard” is a fiction.
Here’s a great video about hair as a spiritual antenna with some more history and a little science, plus some hair-care tips:
Mary Magdalene’s Demons
In one of the famous scenes in The New Testament, Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus with expensive oils (e.g. myrrh) and Judas rebukes her for it. They were on a mission to help people — how could she waste so much money on frivolities?
Jesus Christ Superstar depicts this scene with an absolutely beautiful song —
(Note that everyone in this scene has long hair … except for Judas).
I’m (slowly) reading Margaret George’s Mary, Called Magdalene. I’ve been watching YouTube videos from Gnostic accounts talking about her story.
Mary and I have a lot in common.
Like me, Mary was the daughter of a wealthy man. She owned and read a lot books as she was growing up. And like me, she married a Jew who did not come from money and who was on a spiritual mission.
She may also have been blonde (or strawberry-blonde).
We were both possessed by demons. I became demonically possessed in the hospital, when I was one, recovering from the fall off the staircase that permanently dented my skull and left me with chronic, often debilitating, pain.
I never forgave my parents for letting me fall. And I never forgave them for going on vacation for three weeks and leaving me with my mother’s adoptive mother shortly after the accident. I held on to that anger, loneliness, and resentment.
I held on to my demons.
I lashed out by being irresponsible with money. By taking my father’s wealth for granted. I’ve been generous to others — often too generous. But I’ve also spent money on stuff I didn’t need; clothing, drinks at coffee shops, eating at restaurants, expensive oils like frankincense and myrrh I’ve used to enhance my beauty.
Judas didn’t attack Mary because of one indiscretion. She was likely spending a lot of money on unnecessary things, undermining Jesus’s mission with her frivolities and vanities. Mary was corrupted, her spiritual antenna was off because of her indiscretions. And through her corruption, she undermined Jesus’s mission and message and made a hypocrite of him.
As Judas sings in Jesus Christ Superstar, “It doesn’t help us if you’re inconsistent / They only need a small excuse to put us all away.”
“The classic female sinner-turned-saint, Mary Magdalene, was in medieval times thought to be a reformed prostitute and, of course, blonde. She was understood to be the same Mary who washed Christ’s feet and dried them with her hair. It’s amazing what takes on erotic connotations if you’re a celibate medieval priest, and the fifteenth-century preacher Bernardino da Siena worked himself up to a lather with this (entirely non-Biblical) story:
“her third sin was through her hair … she did everything she could, to make herself more blonde”
— Jeanne de Montbaston, “On Female Beauty and Male Violence”
One of the common ways women made their hair blonder back in those days was by using saffron, a rare and expensive spice with incredible medicinal properties. I think it’s possible that Mary was guilty of using saffron in her hair when the money and the medicine could have been put to better uses. (But I don’t think she was a sex worker).
We create the world with our decisions. When we spend our money on vanities, we make the world more vain. When we spend our money on childish things, we make the world more childish. When we spend our money on poisons, we make the world more poisonous. Etc.
Living in alignment with Spirit — with God, with Nature — means we should try to consume as little as we need to be healthy. We should treat resources such as money, time, frankincense, myrrh, and saffron (etc) as precious.
According to legend, Mary Magdalene never got over Jesus’s death. She became a desert recluse, naked except for her long hair — she may have even developed hirsutism (hair all over her body, like an animal).
Wandering alone, naked except for her long spiritual antenna, listening to Jesus’s voice from the spirit world.
I think there is a lot more to the story of Jesus — and Mary Magdalene needed to tell it. But she didn’t.
Kabbalists believe that sometimes, under traumatic conditions, a failed mission, upon death a soul can shatter — fragment, create fractals.
I think Mary’s soul shattered. And at least some of the pieces are walking around today.
I’m tempted to defend myself because my biggest demon isn’t vanity. I don’t buy or wear make-up or jewelry, I don’t buy that many clothes, I’m not on Ozempic or any other weight-loss medications.
My biggest demon is pain. And that’s what I’ve blown the most money on — drugs, alcohol, sugar, tobacco to cope with the pain demon I just won’t let go. (And medicines to heal the damage I’ve done to my body from my self-destructive behaviours). I’ve also wasted a lot of time doing stuff like crying on the floor when I could have been writing or doing something else productive.
I really thought that magic mushrooms and my husband banished all my demons. I thought I was saved.
But the thing is, mushrooms can’t banish your demons for you. A good man cannot banish your demons for you. Not even God can banish your demons for you. Mushrooms, God, and the love of a good man cannot save a woman from her demons.
They can show her her demons so she can save herself. So she can banish them herself.
But my demons got the better of me this summer.
I’ve done a lot of soul-searching, and I’ve realized I don’t want to repeat Mary’s mistakes. I want to be a good partner to my husband, to help him with his spiritual and medicinal work, and not undermine his mission with my demons.
I am trying to banish them now. To be better. To not be so reckless and self-destructive, to not let the pain of an old childhood wound possess me.
And to do that, I need to let go of my Elsa tendencies to shut people out, of my Rapunzel-style emotional lability and naivety, of my tendency to take too many substances and pass out Sleeping Beauty-style. To stop being such a ridiculous little princess, and grow up into a queen.
To let go of my demons.
And I think I’m finally ready to do that. I have to do that.
If you enjoyed this essay, and/or any of my other work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing (paid subscriptions is on, but all content is free to read) —
Thank you for reading.
~ Meghan
I’ll end on a song, because music is healing —
Honestly the best article I’ve read in a long time. Very entertaining and engaging!
Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
- Yeats
(There’s more to the poem, but this is my favorite verse)