didn’t read the whole thread, so sorry if someone already said this;
Both are correct, but have slightly different connotations.
Bleach Blond hair is blond hair of a particular shade/hue/whatever or a person who has bleached their hair blonde
Bleached Blonde hair has been … well, bleached, no matter if that bleaching action came from peroxide, actual bleach, or lemon juice and sunlight.
Yeah, that too! I knew there was another peef along these lines that my 10th grade English teacher had, and this was it! It had be “iced tea” because it is tea that has been iced. :smack:
And a suicide blonde did it herself. (You know… dyed by her own hand.)
Do those stats correct for “bleached blonde” being used in the context of, “She went to the hairdresser and had her hair bleached blonde”? Because if it doesn’t they are meaningless.
If well over 90% of the examples found were used in the context you described, I will concede your point. You can test it by doing a google search for /bleached-blond/, and checking out a random sample of them to see how often that context occurs. I am going to predict that it will be less than 90%. Here’s your chance to prove me wrong.
I’m not here to prove you wrong, it’s your cite to make sure it says what you say it does. For the record I don’t disagree with you, I just think Google popularity searches aren’t always a good cite.
Bleached blonde, as in, hair is bleached. Bottle blonde, same. Beach blonde (no L in beach), essentially the same but more natural looking, i.e., like you got the look from being on the beach. Sunkissed and all that.
It sounds like “bleach blonde” may be a confusion of “beach blonde,” or it could just be how some people say it. Don’t use Google hits as a source. Lots and lots of people are wrong. Use whatever you want, but if you want to be excruciatingly correct, use “bleached.”
Disclaimer: I am a professional editor.
Peroxide comes in a bottle.
Bleach comes in a bottle.
Dye comes in a bottle.
So all the above could be called bottle blondes.
Now the thing is, for hair that is dark, it first has to be bleached before it can be dyed to a specific shade, or that’s my understanding. (My hair is not dark naturally so I don’t really know this firsthand.) What I’m saying, it can be a two-step process. So “bleach” can mean removing the color, or it can mean the specific means of removing the color. (For instance, hair can be sun-bleached, lightened by exposure to sun. Obviously, not just hair–fabrics, paint. But it can also mean using bleach, the product, to remove the color.)
I think the connotation here is pretty much the same for a bleached blonde or a bottle blonde. For some reason, to me, “bleach blonde” sounds a little cheaper. “Beach blonde” as I mentioned in my previous post sounds like what somebody would write in a magazine to mean a more natural-looking blonde.
The masters speak:
Well, of course it doesn’t “correct” for that (though a corpus isn’t supposed to do its own “correcting”), and that’s the problem with N-gram in general: It’s not really a true corpus. Still, even if you could, that kind of causative form is relatively rare, so it wouldn’t matter that much in this particular discussion anyway, as jtur88 points out. It wouldn’t make it much more meaningless than N-gram already is.
The other issue with N-gram is that it’s mostly just printed language. That would make it more “meaningless” than anything else, because when usage changes over time usually those changes in print are reflected only after the changes have occurred in speech for a while. Writers could be writing it 10 to 1 in one way now, but with time you could start to see the written form change to reflect speech more and more frequently (such as with ice tea).
What we’re really talking about here is deletion of medial (or linking) /t/, because that’s what this sound is (at the end of bleached), even though it’s represented by the letter D. It is normal American English phonology to delete that sound, and so it is common to see people writing it as simply bleach. Some people may not even be aware of the true abstract phoneme that they are deleting (or not writing). At some point it ceases to really matter, as in the case of ice tea vs. iced tea.
I’ve always said “bleach” …But I am not sure if that is correct or not. 
When Gandalf is introducing the Balrog in the FotR movie it definitely sounds like he is saying “a demond of the ancient world.”
I expressed an opinion, and presented data to support it. If you disagree with the data, it is incumbent on you to present better data. If you consider the results of the Ngram viewer to be a "popularity search, show your data. I just think posters opining that “this may be wrong” aren’t always a good cite.
OK, then, “going to” occurs much more often than “gonna” in printed English, but not in spoken English. Does that invalidate the argument that “going to” is correct? Double negatives occur widely in spoken English, but almost never in written English, for the simple reason that written English passes, usually, through an editor who knows what is correct and what is not.
It is very possible, over time, that “Us ain’t gonna do none o’ dat” will show up in politically correct dictionaries at some future time without a usage annotation, but that doesn’t mean that we should entertain arguments today that they are correct in the first place.
If you are of the school that “there is no such thing as ‘correct’” in language", as a universal and inviolable rule of linguistics, then say so, and your comments will be viewed in that light.
I’d have to agree with bleach blond, although just about every other argument to the contrary is valid for those specific cases (iced tea, shaved ice, etc.)
Dyed by her own hand?
For that matter, is it “charter flight” or “chartered flight”?
I’d prefer a beach blonde to a bleach blonde 