A brand new for ’22 thesis that brunette is
The Hair Colour of the Moment has set the
internet on fire, prompting The New York
Times to do a deep dive into the notion, and
inspiring Camille Charrière, Instagram
tastemaker and long-standing blonde, to
tweet (alongside a picture of early 1990s
Kate Moss, walking the catwalk with long,
untreated mid-brown hair) that “the return
of 90s bleach-free hair (like so) is the only
good thing to have come out of this
pandemic and the one resolution I’ll
realistically stick to because it requires less
maintenance on my part — not more!”
So: top marks to the internet for finally
catching on to a truth that comes as no
revelation to me, a lifelong brunette. I did
not need historically blonde, culturally
current beauty and style icons like Hailey
Bieber, Billie Eilish, Florence Pugh and Gigi
Hadid to go suddenly, dramatically dark so
that I might conclude I’d been right all
along. Nor did I need TikTok to pronounce
blonde hair “cheugy” (a word I know you
don’t need me to translate; you’re already
aware it’s a Generation Z diss, a mash-up of
“try-hard” and “basic”, with heavy over-
tones of “out of touch”) to reassure me —
my own mid-to-dark chestnut is far from
cheugy. I am a brunette to my core: proud,
shiny and infinitely more capable of
carrying off yellow than any of my unfortu-
nate blonde associates. Brown hair is woven
into my identity, formative of my person-
ality, essential to my look. Do I think it’s
The Hair Colour of the Moment? Nope.
I think it’s The Hair Colour of Always.
Yet there certainly is a lot of it around.
Bieber, Eilish, Pugh and Hadid, sure, but
also: Emily in Paris’s bouncing dark waves,
the French as f *** mid-tones of Sylvie, her
boss. And while we’re in Paris, a moment,
s’il vous plaît, for Call My Agent!’s Andréa
Martel and the perfect symbiosis between
her brown lob and the depth and definition
of her cheekbones. Might it be preposterous
to suggest there’s something inherently
French about the state of brunette? Maybe
not — the origins of the word itself are
clearly French (mid-16th-century, feminine
diminutive of brun, brown) after all, and the
enduring associations between brunette-
ness and chic equally French.
Rise of
the power
brunette
From Billie Eilish to
Florence Pugh, the latest
celebrity hair trend is
to ditch the blonde.
What took them so long,
asks Polly Vernon
(mid-chestnut and proud)
Photograph Lily Bertrand-Webb
Styling Flossie Saunders40 • The Sunday Times Style