Blonde versus brunette rivalry
In popular culture and everyday conversation, the words blonde and brunette are sometimes used as nouns to refer to women by these two hair colors.
[9] Blonde vs. brunette rivalries in U.S. society date back to at least 1875, when the first female professional baseball players were assigned to teams according to their hair color.
The games have received considerable publicity, including feature articles in The Washington Post, and are now played in 16 cities around the United States.
Anson Dorrance, the women's soccer coach at the University of North Carolina, is known for dividing his team into blondes and brunettes and then having them compete against each other.
Losers have been forced to stand in front of the goal facing the rear of the net while the winners take penalty shots against their posteriors.
"[24] In Cruel Intentions, a dark-haired Sarah Michelle Gellar spreads the rumor that her rival has fake blonde hair.
[24] In Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone battles a Russian blonde nemesis named Ivan Drago.
[25] In a 2012 interview with NBC News, Lisa Walker, chair of the sociology department at the University of North Carolina, explained that hair color "absolutely" plays a role in the way people are treated.
[26] A Cornell University study showed that blonde waitresses receive larger tips than brunettes, even when controlling for other variables such as age, breast size, height and weight.
[26] A well-publicized 2011 University of Westminster study, however, evaluated how men perceived women who entered a London nightclub as a blonde or a brunette.
The study, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, used the same woman and had her dye her hair a different color for each visit.
[30][31] In 2014 a study analyzed the experiences of blonde Swedish women who migrated to Singapore, a country with a large population of Chinese people.
[32] According to Jay Zagorsky, author of the study, the results show that: "the average IQ of blondes was actually slightly higher than those with other hair colors, but that finding isn't statistically significant."
