:dubious: Or the Musically-Talented Asian Female Hottie?
In regards to the OP, I have to also say it’s because redheads are hot. But I would like to see more raven-haired girls out there, not to mention a single word for raven-haired girls.
Blondes.
Redheads.
Brunettes.
Raven-haired…just doesn’t fit.
Ravenishing? 
AFAIK, black hair is generally considered a subcategory of “brunette”, which means “having dark or brown hair”, “not blonde”. Raven-haired beauties are brunettes.
(Yes, I know that “brunette” is literally from “brun”, “brown”, but black-haired Spanish or Italian or Asian girls are frequently referred to as “brunettes”.)
If you want a special term for the raven subcategory, I guess the most likely options are “black-haired” or “dark brunette”.
Still no luck on answering the GQ, huh? Remember, I’m not really asking whether people like to see redheads in a BBR trio or whether you think redheads are hot; I want to know how and when the trend of the BBR trio got started.
Not arguing the point that there might be a particular work that started the trend, but…
Just to elaborate on what I mean by this being a natural aesthetic… colors or shades with a maximum amount of ‘contrast’ look good together and stand out. (Colors that are very close to the same shade also look good together sometimes, but not really in the same way.) This is based somewhat on cultural ideas about color, but also based on the physics of it, on different quantities of reflected light primarily in the Red, green, and blue frequencies that all human eyes register. The greater difference found in all of the RGB color values, for instance, the greater the generally perceived contrast.
Most of these colors that can be found in human hair represent a somewhat blobby region of the ‘color cube.’ For instance, very few people naturally have green or blue hair, a few have nearly pure white because of a kind of genetic disorder we call albinism… but anyways… the most ‘extreme’ colors found in human hair are dark, almost black with perhaps a slightly yellowish or orangish tone, (raven-haired or brunette… what different people mean by the term ‘brunette’ varies widely I think,) extremely pale whitish-yellow, (blonde,) and vibrant red with a slight orange tone added. In each of these cases, if it’s physically possible to move to a different color with a higher degree of contrast to the other two, that color would be extremely unlikely and/or unnatural as a human hair color. Same thing with trying to draw a different ‘triangle’ to occupy a larger contrast area in different parts of the color cube. If you leave out most of the reddish hair tones, then all you get is a wandering line from light yellow through yellow, brown, to browny-black or black.
That’s all that I meant to say.
Whoops, missed your extra reply, maybe I shouldn’t have gone up on that soapbox. Still, it kind of looks like the answer to the OP you’re constantly trying to force us back to is “as far as we know, there isn’t one place it started, learn to deal with that.” You’ve pointed out a long trail of examples without any particular signs that one was seminal or particularly influential. I think it’s quite likely that if you were looking for was real, one of us would have suggested it by now.
Well chrisk, you may be right, but since the thread’s been up only about 15 hours so far, I’ll keep hoping that another Doper might come along and suggest an actual answer.
Not that I’m ungrateful for the other information posters here have provided, certainly! In particular, the stuff about the visual effects of different hair colors is pretty cool.
Does Cecil ever read these posts and make a column from them? Seems to me, he’s as good a source as any of us, better even.
Alright, cool, sorry if I sounded a little snippy in that last post.
Think of it this way… even if someone else’s reply is a little off-topic, at least it brings the thread back to the top of the GQ forum. Just remember to be nice about it when reminding us of your OP, to make sure that the thread doesn’t wander too far. LOL.
Thanks chris! By the way, I went looking for other “Three Graces” imagery to see if the BBR theme was prevalent there. In the pictures on this site, the Rubens Graces look sort of BBR, as I noted above, but Raphael and Burne-Jones and the anonymous Roman Empire fresco painter make them all brunettes. So did Jacques-Louis David.
And in Botticelli, they’re all about the same shade of browny-blonde.
I’m leaning towards samclem’s suggestion that the BBR convention is a Victorian or post-Victorian thing, possibly influenced by all those pre-Raphaelite portraits of redheads. Seems to be pretty firmly entrenched now, though.
I’m a redhead with a special fetish for redheaded women. Oh, and let’s get going with the stereotypes:
Red headed stepchild (yeah, right dad).
Hot tempered redhead. Yum
Smart red head – Blossom from Power Puff Girls
How can you tell when you’ve satisfied a redhead in bed? She unties you.
KImstu. Now that I’ve reread your OP for the twelfth time 
, I just thought of a question that we need to ask ourselves before we can possibly answer your question.
What was the first group of three women who were entertainers or whatever? That’s not something that I remember from movies from the thirties. I doubt that there were trios of female singers much before the Andrews. Then the question is, were the Andrews Sisters picked specifically to have three women with three different hair colors?
Hair color was VERY much an important thing with actresses in the 1930’s. I"ve gleaned that much from reading newspaper articles from the period. Fads came and went, and blonds went to redhead, and redheads changed to blonds. And Harlow went to platinum. So, it WAS a big deal in the movie industry at that time.
But, again, you need to figure out some other groups of three of women from the 1940’s, 1950’s etc. Did the pattern continue? Or were the Andrews just a random selection?
There were the Boswell Sisters from the 1920’s, but they were three brunettes.
The Andrews Sisters, like a lot of other “sisters” singing groups in the 20’s–50’s, were actually sisters, but I don’t know what their original hair colors were. I’m just going to assume that after the terrific popularity of the Andrews Sisters in the 1940’s, the BBR trio theme was already quite well established. The question is, how far back can we trace it?
Now I’m struggling with the additional factor that at least until well into the 19th century, in Anglophone culture at least, red hair was considered rather disfiguring instead of attractive, and probably wouldn’t have been a selling point in any “bevy of beauties”.
We need an art historian who specializes in Victorian or Edwardian ephemera and knows whether the BBR trio would have been a typical image in advertising of the day. I just haven’t got the knowledge of the field. Plus I’ve got really tired of weeding out the irrelevant vast majority of the hits that come up when you google “blonde brunette redhead”. I think I give up. Thanks anyway, everybody!
There might be some clues to the culture in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Red-Headed League”. But it’s been to long since I’ve read it for me to make any judgements from it.
Indeed, even now there must be a perceived problem with being a redhead. My friend and his wife, recent transplants from the UK, are what we in the US call strawberry blond and what they refer to as Ginger. When they first came here that made a lot of jokes about not being allowed in because of being “Gingers.” No one here really understood the jokes, especially since the wife is perfectly lovely. But I guess there is some perception in the UK regarding redheads.
In terms of history, in the Middle Ages redheads were percieved as unlucky or untrustworthy - there are medieval portraits of Judas as a redhead, and parents were warned not to hire a redheaded wetnurse as her milk would be sour, and so on. Perhaps Elizabeth I (1533-1603) changed all that, since women at her court used to try and emulate her by dyeing their hair red.
(This stuff is all from history books I’ve come across, so no links, sorry).
I’m a redhead, and my mother was redheaded. My addition to the stereotypes:
Don’t mess with a small redhead - they will hurt you.
(Mama was about 5 feet tall.)
Bob Loblaw, how’re you doin?
Oh, why did it have to be snakes!
As I recall, there was no signifigance, besides the fact that the con-man who started the thing was a redhead. But, as with you, it’s been to long since I’ve read it for me to be sure.
It was a more important point that the sort-of victim was red headed.
As I recall it, though I haven’t read it in a long time either:
A red headed shopkeeper was told that because he had red hair, he could be the beneficiary of “The Red Headed League”, which meant he got paid handsomely for performing some menial task away from his shop for a few hours a day. He came to Holmes because the money had suddenly stopped. What was really going on was that the guy who approached him was in collusion with the assistant who turned up on the shopkeeper’s doorstep, and what they wanted was the shopkeeper away from his shop while they dug a tunnel in his basement to rob a nearby bank. Holmes, of course, figured it all out and foiled the bank robbers.
It’s only a hockey team! 