I saw the light at 22. Since my teens, I had been dyeing my naturally mousy hair very dark brown. Shades such as “mahogany” and “praline” were unforgiving against my pale skin, but that wasn’t important to me. As a teenager, I was desperate to be taken seriously and thought of as smart, maybe even intimidating. I wanted to be brunette to signal that I had chosen books over looks.

Then, one day, shortly after I started my first job, it dawned on me: I didn’t have to do all that. It took two sessions with a professional to lighten my defiantly darkened hair, but I felt lighter at once. It was as if the bleach had seeped through to my brain, lifting not just my locks but my disposition.

The angst and earnestness of adolescence now seemed distant and hard to understand. Why had I ever felt like that, I wondered, smiling bemusedly, like Gwyneth Paltrow, when I could have been feeling like this. It is no coincidence that fairytales make so much of “flaxen hair”: I felt both charmed by the world and charming, as if I might coax songbirds to do my bidding.

For the first few weeks, out in public, I could feel people’s eyes on me, not because I was any more attractive – I didn’t kid myself – but because I felt more attractive and perhaps more visible. I moved confidently through the world, my honeyed head held high.

The so-called “halo effect” proved real, and aptly named. As a brunette, my most disagreeable traits – such as my tendency towards pedantry, debating and generally bringing down the vibe – had been obvious. Being blond softened those harsh edges, as though my every word and deed was implicitly tagged with lol – just kidding. It wasn’t just that I was having more fun. I was more fun, if not fun for the first time.

The difference was so marked, I could only assume that life got better the lighter your hair got. So, over the next decade, I dedicated time, money and effort into testing the hypothesis.

In the years since my scalp was first blessed with bleach, I’ve been in and out of salons, chasing my perfect shade: honey blond, sandy blond, dirty blond, golden blond, strawberry blond and very nearly platinum. Some looks did me no favours, evoking a scarecrow’s straw-like tresses. But despite ups and downs along the road, my holy grail was never in question: to be, if not the fairest of them all, indisputably fair – and make it seem effortless, even when it was anything but.

It was a small price to pay, or so I thought. As with every fairytale, there was a dark side. But it took years to wake up to it.

You may be thinking (at least if you are a brunette) that I must be exaggerating – that there is no way that life as a blonde can be so different, so much better. But, as Joanna Pitman sets out in her eye-opening cultural history On Blondes, they have held our attention for centuries, for better and worse.

Only 2% of the adult population globally is said to be naturally fair. Yet blond (and white – the two terms aren’t interchangeable, though they are often used as such) women have been disproportionately the focus of mythology, culture and even politics. Likewise, blond is the most popular shade of dye.

Pitman tried it herself, bleaching her light brown hair – and, like me, instantly “felt younger and, strangely, more positive”. The effect was such that the associated upkeep started to seem not just worth it, but an investment. “After a while I wondered whether I could afford not to be blonde,” Pitman writes.

The benefits don’t seem to distinguish between bottle blondes and natural-born. Studies have shown that blond (and, again, white) women receive more male attention than brunettes.

That may not be your idea of fun – but blondes also have more funds. A 2008 study found blond female door-to-door fundraisers solicited more and larger contributions than their brunette counterparts. In an experiment reported on in 2012, waitresses wearing blond wigs received more and larger tips (though only from men). The so-called “blonde wage premium” has been shown to be equivalent to the return from an extra year of education. But a chunk of it, I would guess, goes back into the blond upkeep.

Fair hair doesn’t just look expensive. Regular salon visits are required to maintain the “natural” illusion and lightening is typically one of the most costly services on offer. (Diana, Princess of Wales, was reportedly spending £3,600 a year in the mid-90s – the equivalent of £7,200 a year or £600 a month today.) It is also time-intensive, taking as long as five hours in the chair every three months. Then there is the purple shampoo for banishing “brassy tones”, and the masks, moisturisers and treatments needed to protect against or alleviate the damage done by bleach.

If anything, the faff further demonstrates the blond advantage: you wouldn’t put yourself through it without a payoff. On TikTok it has been termed “blond privilege” as users compare how much better they are treated with lighter hair – like finding “a cheat code to life”, as one woman put it.

“It is like a superpower,” rhapsodises my friend Ingrid. (That is not her name, but it might as well be: her long, light, creamy blonde hair once led her to be mistaken for a local at Oslo airport.)

Ingrid started dyeing her hair as a teenager. “My life changed in a dramatic way,” she says. “People looked at me differently. People were so nice to me, people fancied me.” She likens it to the positive reinforcement and approval that people report after weight loss.

Now Ingrid is committed – to the quarterly dyes, the long stints in the chair, the Olaplex shampoo and other pricey products. After 15 years, she says, her artificial blond feels more than just natural: “It feels like me.” “Blonde” is, after all, a famously seductive identity – which is why we pursue it at great expense, against nature and sometimes even good sense.

As a stylist and image consultant, Francesca Cairns advises clients on shades (for clothing, makeup and hair) that best suit them. In most cases – Cairns estimates 70% – her recommendation is that they dye their hair darker.

“Sometimes I get comments like: do you not like people going blond? But some dye their hair blond simply because it is fashionable, without considering if it is actually going to suit their complexion or features,” Cairns says.

Her recommendation for me, which she demonstrates with a digitally altered image, is a mid-auburn brown. I think I look both healthier and upsettingly ruddy, as if I’ve just returned from horse-riding.

Lightness isn’t the only concern in finding your optimum shade, says Cairns: tone (whether warm, cool or neutral) and overall harmony are also relevant, as well as practical concerns such as budget. But those can get pushed aside by the cultural tide shifting towards ever-fairer hair, Cairns says. “Even I did it when I was younger: I put a lot of blond highlights in my hair, and looked really washed out.”

Sometimes clients tell her that they are reluctant to go darker, “because their husband likes them blond”, Cairns says. “So it is a society thing, where you are maybe doing it for other people, so that they think you’re more fun or whatever, rather than for yourself.”

Celebrities – who have stylists and colourists on speed dial, and are often wearing wigs – also give a false impression of what is possible, Cairns adds. “We all want to try it and experiment, but you find a lot of people do end up going back to a darker shade.” Cairns calls it “blond blindness” – where, by lightening already-bleached strands over time, you can find yourself blonder than you realise or want.

The day we speak, the Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown has just debuted a striking blond look at the Screen Actors Guild awards. Online, commentators speculate that Brown is renewing her bid to play Britney Spears in a biopic or seeking a more mature image, post-child stardom. The Daily Mail just says she looks old. (Brown later addressed the critical scrutiny of her appearance, calling it bullying.)

That is the double-edged sword of blondness, as with many beauty standards: they are precisely calibrated, the rewards (such as they are) predicated on the “correct” performance. As per these unspoken rules, the “wrong” shade of blond – or inches of regrowth, or visible damage – risks drawing the wrong kind of attention, marking someone out as more “blond bombsite” than blond bombshell.

“It is very much a class performance,” says Jennifer Berdahl, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia who studies women and work. Her research suggests that even the purported advantages of being a blond woman – more money, attention, opportunities – are inextricable from the disadvantages. Though there is, of course, no truth to the airhead stereotype (a 2016 study confirmed blondes are no more likely to be unintelligent), Berdahl has found that they might enjoy more success because of the association with stupidity, not despite it.

As rare as it is, still, for women to hold top roles in business, academia and government, those who do are disproportionately likely to be blond. In her unpublished 2016 paper, Berdahl put it at 48% of female S&P 500 chief executives and 35% of female US senators. (Male leaders, however, were no more likely to be blond.) To Berdahl, the finding presented a paradox: why would having blond hair – associated with youth, innocence, even lack of intelligence – be advantageous for leadership? What she found was that a woman was seen as equally competent and independent, whether she had blond or brown hair – but, with lighter hair, she was perceived as significantly more attractive and warmer, and generally “more acceptable” as a leader.

It may go unacknowledged through discussion of celebrities’ bleach makeovers, best “lightening” products and how to achieve “the perfect blond” – but the preferential treatment of blondness is rooted in racial privilege. As Pitman writes, the centuries-long focus on blond is inextricable from its association with whiteness and racial purity, and “some of the most grotesque racially motivated barbarism ever perpetrated”. By bleaching their hair, “even white women can whiten themselves” and access the associated benefits, says Berdahl. She points to the prevalence of bright-yellow-blond women on Fox News and in Trump’s White House, signalling a “subtle, but very powerful, form of racial bias”.

But the cult of blond is so established – not to mention beloved – that many aren’t prepared to reckon with the fact of “blond privilege” beyond a jokey TikTok trend (or humblebrag). In 2023, the US academic Tressie McMillan Cottom, who is Black, was banned from the platform after her video positing “blond as a social status” provoked the criticism of other users. The outsized angry reaction, Cottom wrote in the New York Times, was proof of widespread reluctance to grapple with “the culture, economics and politics of blondness”, and its invisible work in securing, and protecting, power.

Indeed, Berdahl’s findings on fair-haired chief executives were widely interpreted as “a prescription for how to get ahead, like: ‘I’m gonna go dye my hair blond!’” she says. “I would prefer to see people becoming aware of this bias, just like any other bias – and correcting for it.”

In 2023, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, actually did correct for it – and in the most drastic way possible. Frustrated by her “fancy blond lady hair”, and the gendered expectation to maintain the look into her 50s and beyond, Gilbert let loose with the clippers and shaved her head.

For years she had fantasised about “not having to deal with hair any more”, Gilbert told Oldster magazine. What moved her to act was the realisation “that if I were a 54-year-old man, I would’ve buzzed my hair off years earlier, and my life would be simpler and less expensive”.

Reading about Gilbert’s experience clarified my own mounting ambivalence about being blond. Since 2019, when I left my job to go freelance, I had been extending the time between hair appointments and letting more of my natural ashy roots show, by dint of needing to economise and the post-pandemic effect of simply caring less. I had been asking my hairdresser, Katie, for the lowest-maintenance blond possible: we had even given up bleach. When only the lower third of my strands could be considered unequivocally blond, I wondered what I was hanging on to.

You might say the spell was broken.

The morning after the photo shoot for this article, I had a hair appointment. Instead of again requesting a “natural-looking” blond, I showed Katie the picture of Francesca Cairns’s suggested shade of brown.

The appointment was painless, and unbelievably quick. I didn’t quite recognise myself when I looked in the mirror – but I noticed my eyes first.

“Look, I’m a brunette!” I declared to the first friend I saw.

She seemed confused. “I would have said you already were.”