Characteristics of blondes and brunettes — The ingénue and the villainess — Which of the two do men like better? — Sauterne and Burgundy — I like both — All women cannot afford to be blondes — Blondes with dark eyes — Brunettes with blue eyes.
The ideal beautiful woman of the painters is a blonde.
Eve, Venus, Helen of Troy, all the celebrated beauties of antiquity and mythology, are invariably represented as blondes.
Only Cleopatra escaped it.
The reason is no doubt that the very colouring of the blonde, her fair white skin, her light blue or gray eyes, suggest in her the possession, the embodiment of all that is womanly. The blonde is the woman par excellence.
Some people declare that blondes appeal to the imagination, to the heart and to the soul, and brunettes to the senses—that the former are sentimental, sweet, modest, good-tempered, obedient, nay, angelical, whereas brunettes are strong-minded, assertive, conceited, quick-tempered, passionate, often revengeful, and sometimes devilish.
I have known brunettes to be perfect angels, and sweet blondes to be perfect little devils, and so have we all.
However this may be, most women desire to be blondes, and the proof of it is that, whereas a blonde never dyes her hair black, many brunettes dye theirs gold, blond cendré, light mahogany, and other hues of the blonde family.
On the stage the ladies of the ballet and the chorus wear blonde wigs, and the only possible reason to give for this is that managers believe they will look more attractive to the audience as blondes than as brunettes.
In the modern melodrama, the ingénue is blonde and the adventuress or villainess is dark, especially in England and America, where every member of the caste has to be well labelled from the beginning. If the villainess were a blonde, the gallery would take her for the heroine, and things would get terribly mixed. The gallery would no more understand a blonde villainess than they could take for a villain a man who did not wear a chimney-top hat and patent leather boots, smoke a cigarette, squint all the time to the right and to the left, and hiss like a snake every time he took breath.