The concept of “gentlemen prefer blondes,” at least as a common saying, is from Anita Loos’ 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was a massive best-seller and spun off into several adaptations over the decades, most notably the 1953 Marilyn Monroe/Jane Russell musical, itself adapted from a popular stage musical. Loos, a brunette, was inspired by the attention she noticed blonde women received from men she knew, as well as famous Ziegfeld Follies chorus girls, and created Lorelei Lee, a beautiful, airheaded, blonde gold digger who satirized the commercialism and media obsessions of the 1920s.

However, the history of blonde women as symbolizing unattainable beauty and sexual desirability is not limited to the book or its adaptations (thought their collective success undoubtedly cemented the idea in popular culture.) Blondeness, as symbolizing beauty, goldenness, and desirability has been linked by fairy tale scholar Marina Warner with the beautiful blondes of stories like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, who at least in the imagination are envisioned as blonde (in fact, most fairy tale heroines are usually portrayed as blonde, with the notable exception of Snow White.) In his book White, Richard Dyer links blondeness with whiteness, conveying ideas of purity and perfection, as blondeness is seen usually as not just a feminine attribute, but a white feminine attribute. He also notes the artificiality of this type of blonde perfection, as many of the most iconic blonde women of the mid-20th century were not natural blondes (Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot were/are natural brunettes, more on Monroe below; Jean Harlow was a natural blonde, but dyed her hair its extremely unnatural platinum color to such an extent it wrecked it later in her short career.) Hence the unattainable aspect of idealized blondeness.

In film and popular media, at the time Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was written and published many of the popular blonde actresses of the period were not sex symbols, but harkened back to the older associations with blondeness: purity and innocence. Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, both famous blondes with Pickford being nicknamed “the girl with the golden curls,” played ingenues, usually children or teenagers. These were not bereft of associations with whiteness: Lillian Gish played the symbol of white American women under attack by men of color in The Birth of Nation in 1915. The famous Ziegfeld performer Marilyn Miller was also a blonde, but again, not a sex symbol, as her blondeness instead seemed to signify a connection with the Cinderella-like plots of her popular musicals.

While not the first, Jean Harlow was the most significant blonde sex symbol of the 20th century up to that point (1930s.) Harlow, as mentioned, was a natural blonde, but her signature “platinum” blonde hair became her trademark, even starring in a movie by that name in 1931. Her blondeness was played up in promotional events by her initial producer Howard Hughes, who arranged such stunts as a contest where contestants were challenged to match Harlow’s particular shade of blonde for a prize. When Harlow left Hughes and moved to MGM, their first step was to remove the gimmicky associations with her hair style, and they placed her in a film called Red-Headed Woman (1932), written by Anita Loos, where Harlow donned a red wig. The film even comments on both women’s association with blondeness: in the opening, as Harlow's character is getting her hair dyed red, she looks in a mirror and cackles, “So gentlemen prefer blondes, huh?” Harlow’s image often made the connection between her overt sexuality and her blondeness, as well as between whiteness and blondeness - in Dinner at Eight (1933), her character is dressed entirely in white and often shot in an entirely white bedroom set. Harlow might also be the origin of the term "blonde bombshell," after a movie she starred in entitled Bombshell in 1933, which portrayed her as...a Hollywood sex symbol.

As the most famous blonde sex symbol prior to her own arrival in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe looked to Harlow as a model for her own image. Monroe dyed her own hair blonde in imitation, and was associated with another famous blonde when she was given the stage name Marilyn in honor of Marilyn Miller. Monroe’s image doubled down even harder on blonde symbolism: the sexual blonde, the dumb blonde, the white blonde. Particularly in the 1950s, as the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood came under scrutiny, civil rights action gained momentum, and conservative backlash portrayed “Americanness” (read whiteness) as under attack by people of color, immigrants, and Communism, the fact that Monroe seemed to portray the perfect woman further ingrained these stereotypes of blondeness in popular imagination. Monroe’s blonde was sexy yet innocent, more naïve than dumb, more pliant and less threatening than the vampish Harlow, and most of all white, white, white. Monroe’s very importance to elevating the blonde actress and model as the ideal of white feminine beauty can be seen in how women like Kim Novak, Jayne Mansfield, and Mamie van Doren all became imitators in her wake, creating an entire decade of blonde women as icons of celebrity and beauty (also not forgetting women like Grace Kelly, who peddled a very different yet also not entirely dissimilar version of blondeness to Monroe’s.) And of course, the final enhancement came from the fact that both Harlow and Monroe died while still young women (Harlow at 26 and Monroe at 36), further enshrining their media images as eternally young, beautiful - and blonde.