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Hair Of Gold
Rapunzel, like most Fairy Tale heroines, is illustrated with Hair Of Gold
Well I keep on thinkin' 'bout you
Sister Golden Hair surprise
And I just can't live without you
Can't you see it in my eyes?
— America

The character is a blonde. Therefore, obviously, she is beautiful, good, young and innocent. Sweet, wholesome, kind, and feminine tend to be included, and the innocence can range up to Virgin Power.

Men falling under this trope are rarer, but the blond hero can also have Hair Of Gold. Such a hero is more action-oriented than the Hair Of Gold heroine, but he is also good, wholesome, kind to those weaker than himself, modest, and prone to be the Chaste Hero or Celibate Hero.

A prevalent trope wherever blond hair occurs naturally in the population. (Where it does not, Evil Foreigner tends to trump the color.) Since hair tends to darken with age, blondness does correlate with youth, and the innocence is correlated with that. Fiction runs with this so that the women are Colour Coded For Your Convenience.

Often contrasted with a dark-haired heroine — as the Betty in a Betty And Veronica, the Girl Next Door compared to the Femme Fatale, the Damsel In Distress rather than The Vamp, the Country Mouse instead of the City Mouse — or just lacking the brunette's Jade Colored Glasses. A redhead may also contrast, and serve as a rival, though she will likely be more action-oriented than the blonde.

The blonde's youth may also make her more naive than her counterpart, which can, but does not have to, slide into the Dumb Blonde. On the other hand, she may regard studying and doing well in school as part of her responsibilities, and so perform better than her dark-haired and irresponsible Foil.

Victorian literature would also use it to portray her as delicate and fragile, if not actually the Ill Girl — being, of course, Too Good For This Sinful Earth. This part would be a Discredited Trope if it were not a Forgotten Trope. An interesting point is that this usually isn't true everywhere: Most scandinavian stuff seems to connect the Ill Girl stereotype with dark hair.

The trope is presumed to cover only natural blondes, since the correlation with youth no longer holds once dye is used. Indeed, this may drive this trope's interchange with Blondes Are Evil, a deeply Cyclic Trope.

When blondes are natural, blondness does correlate with youth and so is attractive. Women therefore dye their hair blond. But after a critical mass of blondes have dyed hair, it no longer correlates with youth. And it certainly doesn't correlate with innocence; the honest brunette who does not dye her hair, perhaps because she is not scheming to get a man, appears more innocent. Therefore blond hair dye falls out of fashion and then blondes are once again mostly natural blondes and so the correlation recurs — restarting the cycle.

When the cycle is on Hair of Gold, lack of blond hair may convince a woman or girl that she is not beautiful — leading to Beautiful All Along.

Women with Hair of Gold are also prone to Blue Eyes, or Gray Eyes (though this is less common in more recent times). This contains a certain amount of Truth In Television, but it is exaggerated in fiction. They also tend to have voices in the soprano range.

For even lighter hair, see White Haired Pretty Girl.

All inversions belong in Blondes Are Evil.

Not all blondes belong in this list. Not even all good blondes. If the character does not match the personality type, she does not have Hair of Gold and should be listed only if she exploits the expectation.

Examples

Anime

Comic Books
  • Susan Storm Richards of the Fantastic Four
  • Both versions of Supergirl and her stand-in, Power Girl
  • Flare and her younger sister, Sparkplug
  • Blond hair is very common in Marvel Comics due to inking — the easiest colors were blond (just use yellow), black and red. Red hair tended to go to female love interests; black hair was somewhat more likely to go to bystanders and villains; brown hair, as it involved mixed inks, was fairly rare. Naturally, by now this isn't an issue, but characters who've been around since the 1960s keep their old colors.
    • Consider The Avengers: Out of the early roster, Hank Pym, Thor and Captain America were all blonds. In Cap's case, this trope fully applies: He's wholesome, is a good man and blushes at praise, but in others it really makes little difference.
  • Betty Cooper in Archie Comics

Film
  • Following the frequent book descriptions as 'fair-haired', in the two most recent film adaptations of Pride And Prejudice, the prettiest (and most innocent) daughter, Jane, is a blonde. She isn't a blonde in the 1940s film, though.
  • Dale Arden in some films of Flash Gordon
  • Alfred Hitchcock tended to cast blond women as the heroines of his films, as he thought audiences would be more suspicious of brunettes.
  • Buttercup in The Princess Bride; she is also the Dumb Blonde (though not as much as in the book). Westley also manifested the male version.
  • In the latest film adaptation of Sweeney Todd, Johanna is definitely one of these, fitting the innocent, child-womanish category almost to a T.
  • Grace Kelly in High Noon. Initially portrayed as innocent and naive, she proves to be the only person willing to help her husband fight the villains.
  • Male example- "I've been making a man, with blonde hair and a tan."

Folklore
  • The Fair Folk found blond hair so attractive that both babies and women with this color of hair were much more likely to be taken.
  • Occasional fairy tales explicitly describe the heroines as blond in the text, such as The Myrtle, The Goose Girl and Fair Goldilocks. But Victorian illustrators would depict them as blond except when they were explicitly described as not blond in the text. Which is to say, Snow White didn't get drawn as blond (and sometimes even she does).
  • Goldilocks combines both the innocence and the folly associated with blond hair.

Literature
  • In George Eliot's Silas Marner, Silas finds Eppie, a little blond girl, asleep on his hearth. At first he mistakes her blond hair for gold stolen from him, and this plays into his decision that he will raise her.
  • In Gosick, Victorica's hair is mentioned a lot. It's blond.
  • In the His Dark Materials series, the mostly evil Mrs Coulter has black hair, and the always good witch Serafina Pekkala has blond hair. This was reversed in the film.
  • In CS Lewis's The Chronicles Of Narnia, the innocent Lucy, who first finds Narnia and is closest to Aslan, has blond hair. Strangely, this is typically not carried over to the movie versions.
  • Little Women: Graceful and womanly Amy is the only March sister with blonde hair; her opposite, Jo, has auburn hair — appropriate, since they become Laurie's Betty And Veronica. In Little Men and Jo's Boys, Purity Sue Bess inherits her mother's dazzling, mesmerizing, shimmering blonde hair, reminding Dan of the blonde heroine of a heroic epic.
  • Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass illustrations show Alice as blond, over Lewis Carroll's objections, as the original Alice actually was dark-haired.
  • Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess invokes this. The heroine's convinced that she's unattractive ("I am one of the ugliest children I ever saw"), because she doesn't have dimples and golden curls, even though the narrator assures us that she is "a slim, supple little creature" and has "big, wonderful eyes with long black lashes".
    • Which makes it pretty ironic that in one of the movie versions she was played by Shirley Temple.
  • Tamora Pierce consciously averts this. She has stated that none of her heroines are blonde precisely because of this trope, and in Song of the Lioness, the blonde woman, Josaine, is the evil one.
  • In The Clique novels, Claire Lyons has light blonde hair, and is the nicest member of the Pretty Commitee.
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novel Ghostmaker, the benevolent if not nice angel (or hallucination) that appears to Larkins has Hair Of Gold.
    her silver-gold tresses fell to waist length
  • "For her dowry, Fantine had gold and she had pearls, but the gold was on her head and the pearls were in her mouth."
  • Oh, Lucie Manette from A Taleof Two Cities. Just...Lucie. Heck, Charles Dickens makes it a symbol!
  • Jane of "Dick and Jane", the baby sister Sally, and Mother all had blond hair.
  • Queen Ehlana, ruler of Elenia in the David Eddings Elenium novels, is described has having a "wealth" of golden hair.
  • Lady Amalthea, in The Last Unicorn, has white-blonde hair. Justified, however, in that she's the human form of the titular last unicorn, who is white.
  • Dragaera's Empress Zerika has golden hair.
    Vlad Taltos: "...and if I'd meant 'blond' I would have said 'blond.'"

Live Action TV

Mythology
  • Thor's wife, Sif, had golden hair. Indeed, after Loki mischievously cut it off, she had literal golden hair, made by the dwarfs.
  • Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. In the 2005 film Troy she is played by the blonde and blue-eyed Diane Kruger, who is a former model.
    • In some versions of the myth, Helen was described as blonde (as was Achilles) because of the connotations of exoticism.
  • Aphrodite/Venus is also frequently depicted with blonde hair.

Newspaper Comics
  • In Non Sequitur, the blond Kate is the more optimistic and less ambitious Foil to her black-haired sister, Danae.
  • In Peanuts, Charlie Brown's little sister Sally fits this trope. She once answered a question with "How should I know? I'm too young and innocent."

Toys
  • Polly Pocket
  • Barbie and her sisters, teen Skipper, preteen Stacie, toddler Kelly, and baby Krissy, not to mention her Captain Ersatz Cindy.

Video Games

Webcomics

Web Original

Western Animation
Green Skinned Space Babe
« Always Female »
Haunted Heroine
Hair Color Dissonance
« Hair Tropes »
Hair Reboot
Dumb Blonde
« Amazing Technicolor Index »
White Haired Pretty Boy
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