The hidden depths of the blonde bombshell

Western culture, she says, has built a whole mythology around female blondeness − from religious iconography and fairy tales, to art and advertising − that has told specific stories about what it means to be blonde. In cinema’s early years, comedies such as Platinum Blonde (1931) and Bombshell (1933), starring Jean Harlow, embedded concepts of the dazzling, devastatingly beautiful blonde into the cultural vernacular. “The idea that you’re a bombshell, it’s almost like a weapon,” says Nead. “On the one hand, it is this kind of ideal, but at the same time, it’s also threatening.”  

Before Harlow, there was another − more natural-looking − blonde on the scene: Mary Pickford, whose amber curls helped earn her the moniker of “America’s Sweetheart”. But while Pickford played the guileless girl waiting to be rescued, Harlow’s peroxide blonde was more empowered, paving the way for fair-haired femme fatales of 1940s film noir such as Veronica Lake and Barbara Stanwyck, who played alluring but devious women who used their charm and wits to manipulate men.

Alamy

Blonde Ice (1948), starring Leslie Brooks as a cold-hearted adulterer, fraudster and murderer, would capitalise on the popularity of the “blonde ice queen” trope − the protagonist’s halo of golden hair at odds with her dark intentions. It was a construct revisited in the thriller Basic Instinct (1992), where Sharon Stone plays the calculating Catherine Tramell, the suspect in a murder case who succeeds in seducing her interrogator.

Blonde hair, which tends to darken with age, suggests a radiance and a childlike innocence that facilitates the femme fatale‘s deception. In The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), for example, Cora Smith (played by Lana Turner) lures her lover into helping murder her husband, her flawless white wardrobe and baby-blonde hair disguising the scheming character within.