Blond

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Paris Hilton (2006)

Blond ( French for 'light') refers to a shade between yellowish and brownish, in everyday parlance almost exclusively a hair color . Around two percent of the world's population is blonde (in the broadest sense). Women with light hair (whether natural or dyed blonde) is customarily known as blonde , has set the word Blondin for a blond man.

In the cultures of the Western world many exist Blond-haired stereotypes that are based on fair-haired people.

Biological background

species

Color variations are Ashy , nordischblond , light blond , pale blond and white blond (very light, almost white), medium blond (average blonde), light brown (dark brown in direction), golden blond and wheat blond (toward golden yellow), flaxen blond and auburn (toward red ). Very light blonde, often bleached hair is also called platinum blonde or hydrogen blonde (derived from the bleaching agent used, hydrogen peroxide ). Another widespread shade is the so-called "dyed blonde", it is lighter than dark blonde and approaches the golden blonde. There are also mixed types, here all color forms or types can be combined with one another. See also Falb .

Occurrence

Original occurrence of blonde hair worldwide

There are blonde people today mainly in northern , western , central and eastern Europe and among the descendants of European immigrants in the USA , Canada , Australia , New Zealand , southern Brazil , Argentina , South Africa , Namibia and Siberia . But they can also be found in North Africa and the Middle East . In Lebanon, for example, there are mountain regions with a large proportion of blond people. In Morocco , too, there are always blonde and blue-eyed members of the Berbers . Since the genetic origin of North Africans is strongly characterized by mixtures based on historical migration movements, including European ancestry, it is not surprising that they are particularly variable. In the purely indigenous population, however, they are almost only found in Europe, West and Central Asia. In most blond-haired children, the hair color darkens in the course of physical development, as the production of melanins is often increased in childhood. This process is known as darkening . The Aborigines in the western part of Australia, especially in the interior of the country, also have lightened hair. Especially children and women show this light hair.

A small portion of the indigenous population in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands is also blonde. The people there have very dark skin and blonde hair. Although the genetic cause is fundamentally different (it is based on a rare allele of the TYRP1 gene ), especially children in the oceanic populations are often blond, while the hair color darkens in the adolescents.


  • Two blond men (Baltic and Scandinavian origins)

  • A blond Vanuatu boy

  • Children from Mbarama, Solomon Islands

  • An Albanian school class in Korça

  • A blond Hmong man

  • A blonde Mongolian girl

  • Blonde hair in Central Asia: ( Uyghur girls in Turpan, Xinjiang, China) - naturally blonde with " Mongolian fold "

  • A girl from Cabo Verde

Inheritance

Hair color is created by the storage of the color pigments eumelanin and pheomelanin . If the proportion of pheomelanin outweighs the eumelanin, it leads to a blonde or reddish color. The final color is determined by the amount of phaeomelanin ( enzyme activity ) produced. Since pheomelanin has a much weaker color than eumelanin, the proportion of blondes is greater than that of redheads.

The pheomelanin itself has a reddish blonde hue. This becomes visible with bleaching , where the dark eumelanin is washed out first and a typical red-tinged undertone appears. Compared to the genetics of red hair , blonde hair is mainly caused by a strong reduction in eumalin production or melanin production overall. Accordingly, found gene locations are often causes of albinism and leucism , in which melanin production fails completely. The effect of the kit ligand on the steel locus has long been known in animals, for example.

The blonde hair color is recessive , since a single complete allele for melanin production at the gene location is sufficient to produce a dark hair color. Accordingly, many dark-haired people of European origin are also carriers of an allele for blonde hair, so that two dark-haired parents can have blonde offspring for life. In return, two naturally blonde parents cannot have dark-haired children.

By 2018, 13 genetic locations were known that determine hair color. After examining 300,000 subjects, a team from the University of Rotterdam was able to establish a correlation to 124 gene locations, one of which is on the X chromosome. There was also a finding that women are much more likely to remain naturally blond in adulthood, so the darkening of children's light hair color is weakened. The reason for this is still not understood.

In a study published in 2014, it was shown that the KITLG gene is related to the extent of blonde coloring in northern Europeans. KITLG codes for an essential ligand (KIT ligand), which is crucial in the development, transport and differentiation of various cells in the body, including a. Melanocytes , blood cells, or sex cells . A certain point mutation in KITLG leads to an inhibition of the special transcription factor LEF1 ( lymphoid enhancer-binding factor 1 ). LEF1 is involved in the development and regeneration of hair follicle cells. The inhibition causes less melanin to be synthesized in hair follicle cells (20%). This makes the hair appear lighter.

The blonde hair of the natives of Oceania seems to have developed independently. This is attributed to a change in the TYRP1 protein . A substitution of an amino acid in this highly conserved enzyme is believed to be the cause and, with an occurrence of 26% in the population of the indigenous people of the Solomon Islands, is very common, but not found anywhere else.

There are various theories about its origins. While the Danish researcher Hans Eiberg attributes the eye color blue - which occurs particularly frequently in blond people - to a single mutation in the Mesolithic of Eastern Europe, the German anthropologists Mark Stoneking and Michael Hofreiter see the blond and reddish hair color as the result of many mutations that occurred several times independently of one another of the MC1R gene. This mutation took place in both the Neanderthals and modern humans in Ice Age Europe 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. Jonathan Rees, a dermatologist at the University of Edinburgh, and the Oxford geneticist Rosalind Harding came to the conclusion that this mutation - which is also responsible for light skin color - could only spread under the weak sun of Central and Northern Europe. While the new feature put the affected people at a disadvantage under the strong UV radiation of the south, it was advantageous in areas with weak solar radiation or frequently overcast weather, since light skin favors the formation of the essential vitamin D3 with low UV radiation.

According to an aDNA study published in February 2018, blonde hair color appeared for the first time in two individuals who were around 15,000 BC. Lived at Afontova Gora. They were mammoth hunters on the Yenisei near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia (4,100 kilometers east of Moscow). The CC and CT variants of SNP rs12821256 found in them are, according to more recent studies, associated with a significantly increased probability of having blonde hair. The same gene variants are found in a hunter-gatherer individual at the excavation sites Motala (southern Sweden around 6,000 BC), Samara (on the Volga) and in the Ukraine, as well as in some individuals belonging to the late Neolithic Yamnaja culture and their descendants ( Cord Ceramic Culture ) are counted. In general, this study finds dark skin combined with blue eyes among Western European hunter-collectors, but often lighter skin combined with light eyes among Eastern European hunter-collectors.

origin

The blond, fair-skinned and blue-eyed type of people make up their largest share of the inhabitants of northeastern Europe today, but according to geneticists they did not develop there. According to ancient sources, such people were also found in North Africa ( Libyan invasion of Egypt in 1208 BC), Central Asia ( Yuezhi tribe according to Chinese sources from the 2nd century BC) or north of the Black Sea ( Scythians according to Herodotus , 5th century BC).

The anthropology assumes that these characteristics at the first modern man of glacial Eurasia were formed when the majority of mankind as inhabitants intensely sunlit areas was dark-skinned, dark-eyed and dark-haired.

In addition to the vitamin D3 hypothesis, there are several alternative hypotheses about the wide spread of the characteristics “light skin”, “blonde hair” and “blue eyes” in Northeastern Europe. The Edinburgh physiologist Jeffrey Mogil found that people with MC1R genes are less sensitive to pain and respond more strongly to morphine. From this he concluded that Stone Age people who were less sensitive to pain might have a selection advantage. The Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost advocates the hypothesis that the spread came about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago due to a shortage of men, which he saw as a result of increasingly dangerous hunting expeditions. The resulting excess of women led to the fact that the men preferred the more exotic blondes from a larger selection of sexual partners. This then favored the fair-skinned type through “sexual selection”. His hypothesis attracted a lot of media interest in 2005, but is outright rejected by most experts.

decline

There are always theses that the blonde hair color should become extinct. Erroneous extrapolations of the decline, according to which people with blond hair must have died out by a certain point in time at the latest, have been spread in the news again and again since 1865; a final high point was reached in 2002. From the principle of recessive inheritance , however, it follows that a mixing leads to the fact that the blond gene is less phenotypically pronounced, but remains genotypically. Without additional selection pressure , extinction in the narrower sense is highly unlikely, but there is the possibility that the property phenotypically (externally) practically no longer occurs. The decline is also favored by the shrinking population ( demographic change ).

Cultural meaning

west

In ancient times , the blonde corresponding to gold was the hair color of the goddesses and gods , heroes and rulers . Accordingly, the hair of today's marble-white sculptures was often painted yellow or gilded. The Greek and Roman writers considered Nordic tribes, some of the Teutons , Celts , Slavs and the Iranian peoples of the Scythians , Sarmatians and Alans to be blond. The Thracians were also described as blond by Homer and Herodotus . The Romans even traded blonde hair for wigs. Their buyers, mostly male Romans, gave this hair to their wives, who adorned themselves with it by working it into their hairstyle. In other, more southern countries, there were a few blonde people, such as the Guanches , the indigenous people of the Canaries .

In the Third Reich , being blond was stylized as the typical “Germanic” mark of the so-called “ master race ” - which played a role above all in National Socialist film policy .

The perception of blondes was heightened by film stars such as Marlene Dietrich or Jean Harlow in the 1930s and Marilyn Monroe as a “blonde sex bomb ” in the 1950s. Naivety and erotic attractiveness were part of her image. Further stereotypes are the “cool blonde” and the “blonde poison”, who, according to the cliché, use their appearance in a calculated and emotionally distant manner, as well as the blonde angel, who is characterized by a radiant and unreal appearance. The hair colors blonde and dark can also identify the good and the bad protagonist, as in the fairy tale Frau Holle Goldmarie and Pechmarie .

More meanings of the word

  • Light tobacco and types of wood, such as oak, are referred to as blond
  • As a noun, blond is also a synonym for light beer, especially Pils ("a cool blond")
  • Horses with a mane reminiscent of blond hair (e.g. Haflingers ) or dogs, e.g. B. the Hovawart , with light fur is called blond
  • If cultivated forms of the guppy have a light or yellow body color, this basic shade is called blonde
  • Dead, no longer green reeds or dune grass are sometimes called blond ("blonde dunes")
  • In Heinrich Mann's The Subject (1918): "blonde eyes" and "blonde meat".
  • In musical instrument making, English blonde refers to a paint that does not change the color of the wood.

literature

  • Roderic Gorney: The Quest for Blondness: An Example Explored. In: The Human Agenda. Simond & Schuster, New York 1972, pp. 585-636 (English).
  • Michaela Krützen: White BLONDE. The hair, the star. In: Wolfgang Ullrich, Juliane Vogel (Ed.): White. A basic course. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 978-3-596-15758-7 , pp. 103-143.

Web links

Commons : Blond Hair  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: blond  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Did Stone Age men prefer blondes? ( Memento from May 29, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  2. ↑ Lara R. Arauna, Javier Mendoza-Revilla, Alex Mas-Sandoval, Hassan Izaabel, Asmahan Bekada, Soraya Benhamamouch, Karima Fadhlaoui-Zid, Pierre Zalloua, Garrett Hellenthal, David Comas (216): Recent Historical Migrations Have Shaped the Gene Pool of Arabs and Berbers in North Africa. Molecular Biology and Evolution 34 (2): 318-329 doi: 10.1093 / molbev / msw218
  3. ↑ Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin (2017): The colors of humanity: the evolution of pigmentation in the human lineage. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 372: 20160349. doi: 10.1098 / rstb.2016.0349
  4. ↑ https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/erbgut-mehr-als-120-gene-entscheiden-ueber-die-haarfarbe/21180522.html
  5. ↑ https://www.welt.de/kmpkt/article175533342/Haare-Das-Geheimnis-warum-so-viele-Europaeerinnen-blond-sind.html
  6. ↑ CA. Guenther et al .: A molecular basis for classic blond hair color in Europeans. In: Nat Genet. , 46 (7), 2014, pp. 748-752, PMID 24880339 , doi: 10.1038 / ng.2991 .
  7. ↑ Eimear E. Kenny, Nicholas J. Timpson: Melanesian Blond Hair Is Caused by an Amino Acid Change in TYRP1 . In: Science . May 4, 2012. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015.
  8. ↑ Zoë Corbyn: Blonde hair evolved more than once . In: Nature.com . May 3, 2012. Archived from the original on May 5, 2012.
  9. ↑ Iain Mathieson, Songul Alpaslan-Roodenberg, Cosimo Posth, Anna Szécsényi-Nagy, Nadin Rohland: The genomic history of southeastern Europe . In: Nature . tape 555 , no. 7695 , February 21, 2018, ISSN  0028-0836 , p. 197–203 , doi : 10.1038 / nature25778 ( nature.com [accessed November 7, 2018]).
  10. ^ Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza: Genes, Peoples and Languages. The biological foundations of our civilization . 1996. German edition 1999, ISBN 3-446-19479-7 .
  11. ^ Elisabeth Hamel: The development of the peoples in Europe . Tenea Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86504-126-5 .
  12. ↑ Why Do Europeans Have So Many Hair and Eye Colors? ( Memento from January 2, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Thorwald Ewe: The fate of the blondes . ( Memento from June 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: Bild der Wissenschaft , issue 6/2009, p. 83.
  14. ↑ tgs-chemie.de