Wouldn't you have to know which ones dye their hair? It may be the hard features, or the skin tone, that people really dislike about blondes.

Agnostic is clearly not getting any blond lovin'.

and took the Dutch values instead of the Icelandic ones

Are you for real? You used the *Dutch* as a baseline for population blondness?

Another explanation for the bimodal distribution is that the same men who prefer dark brunettes over light ones also prefer light blondes over dark ones. My preferences are
dark brunette > light blonde > dark blonde > light brunette

Great post. Seems like the substantial blond advantage in Maxim's '08 hottest list is a fluke, as you've now looked at three different sources suggesting otherwise--unless the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction. (Minor point: The Maxim lists weren't quite consecutive years--yours being '06, mine '08).

What percentage of the Maxim cover girls were non-European? Blonds don't make up a majority of the entire '08 list, but comprise nearly 2/3s of whites. Isn't that what you're actually after? If your population frequency is from the Netherlands, blacks and Hispanics covers are going to artificially make blonds less frequent, even at 10% combined (the '08 list is 19% non-European).

You used the *Dutch* as a baseline for population blondness?

If you look at the link I provided with published data, it shows that they're not very different, blonds being a bit more frequent and redheads less frequent in the Dutch. I chose the Dutch since they aren't isolated and have probably seen more influx of other European groups, compared to the Icelanders, so they seemed like a better choice for Americans.

Here are the results using Iceland, though (there are two estimates for Iceland, so I took the average):

For cover girls, chi-squared = 33.7 (p less than 0.0001) for rounding up, and 33.5 (p less than 0.0001) for rounding down. Depending on the rounding convention, light blonds are overrepresented by 51% or 56%, dark browns by 60% or 63%.

For hometown hotties, chi-squared = 16.4 (p = 0.0003) for rounding up, and 21.8 (p = 0.0001) for rounding down. Depending on the rounding convention, light blonds are overrepresented by 61% or 201%, dark browns by 67% or 75%. Again, the rounding convention here introduces quite a bit more uncertainty than in the cover girl case since the N is a lot smaller.

Blonds don't make up a majority of the entire '08 list, but comprise nearly 2/3s of whites. Isn't that what you're actually after?

I didn't keep track of ethnicity, but I just scanned the list of cover girls, and there are hardly any non-Whites, maybe a handful of White-looking Hispanics (the Wikipedia entry for Maxim's US edition has a link to a list of them all, if you're interested).

You don't want to control for ethnicity, though, since that's an intermediate variable. Consider an extreme case: the top 50 NBA players might show 40 Af-Ams, 5 blond Whites, and 5 brown-haired Whites. If you restrict it to Whites, blonds appear overrepresented.

Thanks.

Have you done an eye color?

I used published data on hair color frequencies and took the Dutch values instead of the Icelandic ones, since Americans must resemble the former more than the latter.

The real test is whether or not a particular hair color is overrepresented relative to the observable hair color in the population, not relative to the natural hair color. Since more women lighten their hair than darken it, it follows that there are more observable than natural blondes in the population. Therefore, you are underestimating the advantage of dark browns over light blondes.

i have always found that blondes will grab my attention more from a distance (like walking on the other side of the street or from across a bar) but dark haired brunettes set against pale skin are sexier to me up close and personal.

The real test is whether or not a particular hair color is overrepresented relative to the observable hair color in the population

It depends on what you're trying to test. It's very possible that more men prefer brunettes, but that blondes are sufficiently rare that they are still able to command more attention. We can imagine a situation where 25% of men prefer blondes, 40% prefer brunettes, and the rest have no preference. If 5% of women are natural blondes and 30% are brunettes, the blondes will still be at a premium in some sense (i.e. there will be more incentive for some women to dye their hair blonde even though, numerically, there are fewer men who prefer blondes).
As regards the frequency of natural light blondes in the US population, I haven't come up with hard data despite a bit of looking. But I do notice that the Dutch data you mention show blue/green eyes at a frequency about four times as high as what we actually see in the youthful US population, which does still suggest to me that your baseline is badly skewed. Maybe it's just because I am not in the upper midwest / pacific northwest (epicenters of US blondeness) but my own observations lead me more to agree with figures like 3-5% that I see thrown around (albeit without any backup).
As regards the idea that more men prefer brunettes, here's a bit of data to support that idea:
Amazon salesrank for 'Playboy Brunettes': 100,000
Amazon salesrank for 'Playboy Blondes': 400,000

I think red hair and green eyes are a killer combination, and has got to be less than 1% of the female population?!

You don't want to control for ethnicity, though, since that's an intermediate variable. Consider an extreme case: the top 50 NBA players might show 40 Af-Ams, 5 blond Whites, and 5 brown-haired Whites. If you restrict it to Whites, blonds appear overrepresented.

If you used that NBA example to insinuate that in the last 50 years brunette basketball players have been making major gains on blond players, I guess semantically it'd be correct using the definition of brunette to mean dark, but...

Interesting post. It looks like a rare-color effect, i.e., the scarcer a color variant becomes in a population, the stronger will be the preference for it.

I know of three estimates of hair color distribution in English and white American samples. The discrepancies seem to arise over 1) whether strawberry blondes are classified as blondes or redheads and 2) whether black hair is lumped in with brunette hair or treated as a separate category.

68.1% brunette, 26.8% blond, 5.1% red. (Rich & Cash, 1993)
68% brunette, 25% blond, 1% red, 6% black (Takeda et al., 2006)
74% brunette, 18% blond, and 8% red (Mather et al., unpublished)

Whereas the most common variant is brown hair, male preference is strongest for blonde and black-haired women. I suspect preference for red hair also exceeds the actual representation of redheads in the population.

References

Mather, F., Manning, J.T., & Bundred, P.E. (unpublished). 2nd to 4th digit ratio, hair and eye colour in Caucasians: Evidence for blond hair as a correlate of high prenatal oestrogen.

Rich, M.K., & Cash, T.F. (1993). The American image of beauty: Media representations of hair color for four decades. Sex Roles, 29, 113-124.

Takeda, M.B., Helms, M.M., & Romanova, N. (2006). Hair color stereotyping and CEO selection in the United Kingdom. Journal of human behavior in the social environment, 13, 85-99

@agnostic

http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=D...feature=related

Do these girls fit your ideal beauty? They are true Euroasians too.

~ The real test is whether or not a particular hair color is overrepresented relative to the observable hair color in the population

It depends on what you're trying to test.

What I am trying to test is:

- the average woman on the street has observable hair color x% X, y% Y, z%Z.
- the average Playboy model has observable hair color x'% X, y'% Y, z'% Z.

Which hair color (X, Y, Z?) is much more often seen in Playboy models compared to its incidence in the general population (e.g., x'>>x)?