The Hair Color 32% Of People Find Most Attractive
Everyone has their own idea of beauty. A canvas filled with blocks and lines is boring geometry to one person and breathtaking modern art to another. And those preferences become even more pronounced when you look at the idea of what makes a person attractive.
Never mind that the ideal bodies for both men and women have changed drastically in the last few decades. Specific traits, like eye and hair color, seem to shift favor every couple of years. And of course, we've all heard that blondes have more fun, but is it true?
One study explained by Psychology Today seemed to support the claim. In 2015, Nicolas Guéguen from the Université de Bretagne-Sud conducted a study that found blondes were approached more often in social settings and received more requests for dates, number exchanges, and dances when out at club or bars.
But another study by Dr. Viren Swami, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, seemed to find that brunettes actually came out on top. According to his study, brunettes were seen as more approachable and intelligent, and garnered more attention while out at clubs.
But we wanted to know which hair color our Health Digest readers preferred. Would you side with Guéguen or Swami? And after more than 500 of you voted, we have our answer.
The winning shade
We set up a poll asking our readers which hair color they found most attractive and gave them five answers to choose from: brown, blonde, red, black, or other. A total of 527 people responded from across America, most of them choosing one specific color. A little over seven percent voted for "other" and wrote in a preference, most of which were either "none" or an equal appreciation for all hair colors. A few people wrote in answers like "salt and pepper" or "bright colors" and "unnatural colors." One person even wrote in a preference for "my wife's," which is probably the sweetest write-in our polls have ever received.
Of the four main options, though, opinions were a little more equally divided. Almost a quarter of the votes went to blonde hair while black hair came close with almost 20 percent of the vote. Redheads came in last but only by a little (about 17 percent of the vote). The only hair color that really broke away from the others was brown hair. Brunettes led the poll with almost 32 percent of the vote.
Of course, hair color preference might change from country to country. Guéguen's study took place in France while Swami worked in the UK where he teaches in the Department of Psychology at the University of Westminster. It could explain why blondes thrived in the French study and brunettes pulled ahead in both the United Kingdom and among our American readers.