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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. She tends to be the younger of the pair; this is even more likely to be true for the male version.

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 generally presumes blond is the natural color, 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
  • Naruto.
  • The titular Candy in Candy Candy.
  • Sailor Moon and Sailor Venus
  • Princess Fala / Allura in Go Lion / Voltron.
  • Urara Kasugano, also known as Cure Lemonade, from Yes Precure 5.
  • Digimon Frontier's Izumi/Zoe Orimoto.
  • Janine from Animerica symbolizes this in every purest form imaginable, making her a direct contrast to not just her Love Interest but to the black-haired Lita and the red-headed Malin. In fact, just about every blonde (except for Takuya and Shirogane) in the series symbolizes this.
  • Vivio of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. The young, cheerful, Mysterious Waif adopted daughter of the main character.
  • Kotori in X1999.
  • Nia from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
  • Several girls from Mahou Sensei Negima, most notably Evangeline, and Arika, Negi's mother.
  • All kirin in the series The Twelve Kingdoms, with one notable exception. Even the exception fits the trope's personality.
  • Soul Eater has a very interesting version with its girls: Maka Albarn's blonde hair has hints of silver (and she is the wisest), Liz Thompson has a caramel blonde coloring (she is the most jaded, though remains optimistic), and Patti Thompson has cornsilk coloring and is the sweetest and most idealistic of the three. Justin Law at first seems to follow this, being a chaste (or so we think), young deathscythe. Unfortunately...
  • Saber in Fate Stay Night.
  • C-ko was described in one of the original Japanese promos as "innocence personified."

Ballads
  • Many Child Ballads describe the hero or heroine as having "yellow hair", at least in some variants:
    • The Twa Sisters — it is, in fact, used to string the harp.
    • The Lass of Roch Royal
    • Walter Lesley belies his yellow hair; the heroine knows he married her for her money and wishes he had not "for a’ his yellow hair;"
    • Fair Janet in Tam Lin
    • In Sir Patrick Spens, the ladies may wait "Kembing down their yellow hair,"
  • In some variants of Famous Flower of Serving Men, both the heroine's loves: the murdered husband ("And don't you think that her heart was sore as she laid the mould on his yellow hair") and the king (" they tangled all in his yellow hair")

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.
      • Speaking of Avengers - The Sentry also has Hair Of Gold, and keeps his long, in order to stand out amongst the other Blonde heroes (except for Thor, but he was dead at the time...)
  • 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 fills both this role and that of the Dumb Blonde (but is even stupider in the book).
    • Westley is this trope in male form.
  • In the latest film adaptation of Sweeney Todd, Johanna is definitely one of these, fitting the innocent, child-womanish category almost to a T.
    • Both the movie and the stage play made a big deal of this. Johanna got this from her mother Lucy, who is described by Sweeney as "beautiful" and "virtuous" at the start of the whole thing, if something of a "silly little nit" according to Mrs. Lovett. Of course, in the stage play, Johanna gets one of the two kills that Sweeney doesn't get when she guns down the asylum keeper Jonas Fogg.
  • 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.
  • Sonja Henie is like this in her films.
  • Luke Skywalker, of course! Idealistic and able to see the goodness in most everyone; this personality trait is pointed out fairly often in the Expanded Universe, and a LOT in fanfic. His four known descendants, however (two redheaded, two blond), decidedly don't fit this trope, and instead wear Jade Colored Glasses.

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, is described (near the end of the first novel) as having blond hair. However, the illustrations by Pauline Baynes show her with black hair and pigtails. She is also dark-haired in 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.
    • In The Secret Garden, Mary has "yellow" hair, but it's played as ugly, stringy and sickly-looking, often mentioned in conjunction with her sallow skin. Presumably this changes after she learns to play outdoors and gets healthier.
  • 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 blond woman, Josiane, is the evil one.
    • Many heroines later, she's finally relented with the Provost's Dog books — Beka has dark blond hair.
  • In The Clique novels, Claire Lyons has light blond 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."
  • Also Les Miserables: Enjolras. Just...Enjolras. "...his fair hair waved backwards like that of the angel upon his sombre car of stars, it was the mane of a startled lion flaming with a halo..."
  • 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. The trope is inverted in the same series by her aunt, Princess Arissa, who has equally blonde hair and is The Vamp.
  • Elayne Trakand from the Wheel of Time series has a mass of 'sunburst' curls
  • 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.'"
  • Pelléas and Mélisande: Mélisande has golden hair so long that from a tower window it reaches the earth.
  • This is very common for the heroines of Roman-era Greek novels, including the female lead of Theagenes and Chariclea, despite the fact that she's an Ethiopian princess.
  • In Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novel Grave Peril, two vampires' dangerousness is contrasted with their Hair Of Gold, their Blue Eyes, and their tennis whites.
  • Both Laurana and Goldmoon in the Dragonlance books are beautiful blonde princessess (elf and barbarian human respectively). The former was naive and self absorbed to the point of being an airhead while the latter was a haughty ice queen worshipped as a goddess by her tribe. They both grew out of it into an Action Girl and The Messiah respectively.
  • In James Swallow's Warhammer 40000 Blood Angels novel Deus Encarmine, Arkio's blond hair makes him look like their primarch, along with his courage and his leadership. Which is part and parcel of why they accept him as the Reborn Angel. A Chaos-inspired lie.
  • In Sonnet 68, William Shakespeare speaks of the Good Old Ways, as it used to be:
    Before the golden tresses of the dead,
    The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
    To live a second life on second head;
  • Harry Potter has Fleur's silvery-blond veela hair and Luna's long, tangled blond Cloudcuckoolander hair.

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. Of course, she was wasn't so much pure and innocent as badass.
  • Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. In the 2005 film Troy, she is played by the blond and blue-eyed Diane Kruger, who is a former model.
    • In some versions of the myth, Helen was described as blond (as was Achilles) because of the connotations of exoticism.
  • Aphrodite/Venus is also frequently depicted with blond 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. When accused of "evading responsibility" by her brother, she responded with, "I don't know what you're talking about...I'm too young and innocent."
  • Cookie Bumstead, if not Blondie herself.

Puppetry

Tabletop Games

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
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Haunted Heroine
Hair Color Dissonance
« Hair Tropes »
Hair Reboot
Dumb Blonde
« Amazing Technicolor Index »
White Haired Pretty Boy
Greater Need Than Mine
« Goodness Tropes »
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