I don’t think they do it for men. I don’t think they do very much of anything for men. I think they do it because it’s “fashionable”.
I’m glad I never had to worry about this. Being South Asian (and thus, “swarthy”), blonde hair really isn’t an option unless I want to look like a space alien. But then, I get to rock the “cute Asian girl” look.
Count me in as not liking the dyed blonde/roots showing look so much. Brown hair is plenty nice on its own, isn’t it?
I can’t speak for the average man, but I personally don’t find it attractive. Then again, I don’t find a lot of things that women do to themselves in the name of beauty to be attractive.
I like women who look like healthy human beings, not half-starved, bleach-drenched balloon monsters.
Here, here. Then again, I like the look of the half-starved balloon monsters, too.
These threads, and this sort of question drives me up the wall: if it’s female, some straight men will find it highly attractive. And if you promise us our friends won’t find out, all of us will do damn near anything.
And Normal Girl #2 is tasty looking.
For some of the women on your list, this vibe will not be affected by hair color or quality of dye job.
And before you Paris Hilton fans jump all over me, I was not referring to her. She’s quite…ethereal. 
There is a young woman I work with who has the fake blonde hair and dark roots. She is ridiculously hot although I think it’s more a function of the sexy shoes, short skirts, and uber confidant attitude than the the fake blonde hair.
Sage Rat–infeasible?
Meh. I think it looks cheap. When I was young, I had white blonde hair, it turned golden when puberty hit and now it’s a sort of reddish dark blonde with gray (yippee. Not).
I think women should do what they like, but should take into account their skin tone. A lot of older women who go blonde end up looking very washed out.
(I think that a lot of girls look good in that shade, but that’s not actually why I’m posting in this thread. )
In some cases, those women might not have started out that precise unnatural shade. All permanent dyes that lighten your hair contain ammonia and peroxide, which effectively strip some of the color out of your hair before laying the dye on top of it. The dye fades at a rate determined by the color and exposure to sunlight.
I habitually dye my hair (naturally a shade of brown that kind of clashes with my skin) to a particular strawberry blond. Red dyes are notoriously unstable, which is one of the reasons why a natural looking, intense red is so hard to find and keep. So my hair fades first to a medium blond over a few weeks’ time. It then continues to lighten more and more until I redye it. If I delayed long enough, I would eventually reach the same shade as those pictures above (well, with dark roots. 
). If you start out dyeing to a light, natural blond, you can easily reach the unnatural shade before your roots show.
I think the difference has more to do with the hairstyle. Also, either the second pic has been airbrushed, or she’s had a little work done.
The only blonde hair that makes me cringe, is the totally depigmented white hair.
I spent years making my hair blonde to cover impending gray. I stopped in January, and I love the results. I’m hoping this color becomes “la mode”:
VCNJ~
(Bolding mine)
And there you have it. There are intelligent men (and, for that matter, women) and there is the bulk of the population…
As Adlai Stevenson is reported to have responded to a supporter who said ‘he was sure to “get the vote of every thinking man”’ – “Thank you, but I need a majority to win.”
They all look OK to me, except Paris Hilton who should do more to get rid of the SKANK tatoo across her forehead.
I don’t mind it. Like most things, it looks good on some people and bad on others. I do my hair like that, and I look GREAT!
[ot]What are you communicating about yourself with this hair color (these hair colors)? <-- genuine curiosity, not snarkiness[/ot]
Exactly - in this case it looks good on 4/7 of the examples in the OP - What the hell Avril’s done to her hair I don’t know, and Paris and the unknown woman just look horrible, whereas the others work very well. It doesn’t look natural, but why should that be an ideal?
To the ‘good’ blondes - Hayden looks good. Faith Hill looks horrid - it looks like a failed attempt at natural blending - and Carrie Underwood’s more in Avril’s range than any of the others, IMO.
Platinum blond is a hard shade to pull off. You have to have the face and skintone for it. And it’s hard to keep up – you have to dye those roots every month to 6 weeks, which is either expensive (if you have it done), or a pain in the butt (if you do it yourself).
I don’t mind platinum blond, when it works. Really, most of your examples looked OK. The second normal girl was very pretty, I think, and her hair looked fine. Clare Danes looked better with darker hair. The unknown woman looked so much like a Barbie Doll that any other color and style of hair would have looked out of place.
I don’t like the dark-root look, though – to me, it just looks like the girl has been neglecting her grooming. I think there’s an attempt to make the dark-roots trendy as a look just because it’s such a pain to keep up with touching them up. But it doesn’t work and just looks sloppy. If you can’t committ to the upkeep, you should probably chose a more forgiving haircolor.
After some thought, I have a two-part answer. First, I can tell you the things I’m communicating: I like colour, I like to do adventurous things with my hair and therefore am not very conservative or traditional.
Second, and more importantly, I don’t really think that communicating things is why I do fun things to my hair. I do it because it’s one thing that I enjoy changing - I like looking different every few months. I like trying out new looks and seeing them in the mirror. I (often) like the way I look with different haircolours. It’s an easy, relatively cheap and definitely harmless way for me to be adventurous in an otherwise fairly mundane life.
Sorry for the hijack. Please, continue discussing how blonde haircolour and low intelligence/low intelligence mates are correlated.
My boss has gone to the two-toned look, with the top layers of her hair dyed light blonde and the lower layers a light/medium brown. She’s young and it seems to suit her. I’m not sure how good it would look on someone older, though.
Just to expand on what Bob55 mentioned, this was taken up in a recent book called
“Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters”. It’s a pretty interesting book even though I’m not sure if I agree with all their conclusions.
If men’s reactions to blondes are programmed by an inborn nature to think “blonde = young = desirable for mating”, I wouldn’t expect them to be very discriminating about good dye jobs vs. bad. 
Most girls I go after tend to be brunettes, my big weakness is for redheads, but I’m a fan of the “Bottle-blonde with dark roots” thing. I dunno, it’s a color-contrast thing for me or something.
Also, it’s worth mentioning (assuming that it hasn’t already, since I just read the beginning of the thread before posting) that girls with fake hair coloring other than blonde can probably pull that off more easily since it’s closer to whatever their color was before.
Also, I’m a fan of the occasional anime hair coloring. I knew a girl in college who died her hair purple during her last semester, in preperation of entering “The Real World™” and not getting to do that again later. Another girl I knew first had bright pink hair, and then blue hair. She showed me her drivers license, and her natural brown hair looked decidedly weird to me because I had never seen her with it in person.