Truth: Girls tend to favor the Disney princess that has the same hair color as them.  You know it.  I know it.  I’ve known a few to have a favorite princess based solely on their story and what they do, but if we’re honest (and for the sake of this post), we’ve tended to love and identify with the princess that looks most like us, and an undeniably big part of that has been hair color.  If you had blonde hair (speaking in past tense because I’m mostly referring to our preferences as children, though you still may very well favor the same princess today), you were probably all about Aurora in Sleeping Beauty (or nowadays, Rapunzel).  If you had brown hair, you tended to bat for the Belle team, or perhaps Tarzan‘s Jane in later years.  My personal Disney brunette of choice has always been Megara from Hercules, but I admit that I never felt quite on par with her sass to feel like I fully identified with her.  Meg was an embittered, distressed woman who sold her soul to the Devil.  I sang in the church choir and ate Spaghetti-O’s.  And my hair was never the size of Michigan either, least so in a ponytail.

Girls with raven-colored hair have had a couple options over the years (with most of them admittedly being introduced to us just within the past fifteen or so), with each princess varying in ethnicity.  Jasmine, Mulan, Tiana, Snow White, Pocahontas, and Esmeralda all have glorious black hair, with Esmeralda always having been my personal favorite as far as hair was concerned.  Seriously, if you’re some five-foot-eleven, bronze-skinned Eastern European chick that can pole-dance your butt off, Esmeralda is your girl and you ought to be proud (because I’ve seriously yet to meet any girl with enough self-confidence to cite Esmeralda as her I’m-most-like-this-one Disney princess.  Kanye West probably fancies himself as an Esmeralda).  If it was the case that you had a kind of in-between, walnut-y, off-blonde shade of hair, you may have favored Cinderella.  And of course, lastly, if you had even the slightest, most diminutive hint of red in your locks, you were most fiercely a redhead and you most fiercely held allegiance to Ariel, and you would cut the fool who tried to futilely convince you otherwise (though Giselle is now here for those who feel best known as “strawberry blonde”).

Hair color’s a funny thing, it is.  I was recently told that I need to post more about non-brunettes, and I confess that if you’re, say, a blonde and you’ve perused my writings, you have probably felt somewhat ostracized.  Can’t say I didn’t see this coming.  I insist not on remaining an entirely solid brunette all my life (and having my ends ombre’d has already taken care of that anyhow), but I do think we can agree that for most girls there’s usually one kind of hair color that they seem to attach to at least a little bit, and mine’s been brown for lack of a more descriptive term.  But for the sake of diversity (but more so for the sake of proving to you that I don’t immediately throw shade at the sight of yellow hair), I shall now present to you my favorite non-brunettes simply based on their hair color and cut, be they redhead, blonde, raven-haired, or a shade in between.

Oh, Julianne Moore.  How I envy those deep copper strands of yours.  I’d only wear such a shade with a thoroughly Scotch-Irish complexion like Julianne’s, but boy does it look lovely.  And of course, it’ll come as no surprise to you to say that I’ve loved that she’s never cut it short.

According to everything I’ve read on the girl, Amanda Seyfried keeps her natural hair color, and God bless her for it.  I love this gold-spun shade of wheat with it’s more ashy, cool tones.  So many girls I’ve known actually have natural color like this, but they’ve all seemed to move on to something different, either in the bottle-blonde range or beyond.  A bloody shame.

For the majority of this country’s existence, Westernized ideals have determined what is seen as beautiful and what is seen as less attractive (see PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING ABOVE … Lord help me) here in the United States.  Natural African-American hair has all-too-frequently been seen as undesirable according to those limited ideals, and a great deal of African-American women have sought the help of weaves and relaxing treatments to achieve a look more in line with cultural standards.  However, there’s recently been a wave of women sticking it to the Westernized man and letting their hair go natural.  I’ve especially loved how Solange Knowles has been rocking this style lately.  Not many of us can do the ‘fro like Solange!

I have a difficult time deciding what to call the shade of Karlie Kloss‘s hair.  It’s the color I was referring to when I was mentioning the walnut-y, in-between shade of Cinderella, so I guess we’ll just call it that- walnut.    If I could go for a complete change in hair color, I’d shoot for this.  I just can’t tell if it’s in the blonde family or in the brown camp, so it counts for this post!  And she just recently ditched her lengthier locks for this shoulder-grazing bob.  In the words of my teacher-friend Amanda, “Le freak so chic!”

  This is Elin Kling.  She’s Sweden’s most influential fashion blogger (stylebykling.nowmanifest.com) and prolific style maven, and I can’t get enough of her hair.  There’s something to be said for that true Scandinavian shade of blonde, not all yellowy like we see so much of in California.  I love blonde when there’s a touch of ice to it.  Oh, and that haircut is about the hottest thing since Gregory Peck.

Does Liu Wen color her hair?  I could never tell ya.  Is it a perfect shade of jet-black, nonetheless?  Yup.  I’ve loved the model’s minimalist, almost layer-less cut for some time, too.  It’s actually what I’ve been attempting to grow out my layers for, and I’ll soon be trying a center-part like Liu’s, too.

And there you have it.  There are seriously a million other heads of hair that I obsess over on a daily basis, but we all know that way too many of them are that deliciously bland shade of mud.  Okay, okay, I know that this isn’t exactly bland.  And that’s why I’m so committed!  How can I ever betray my brunette roots with locks like this out there representing?!  HOW?!  I’ll admit though that I always wished that brunette representative Belle weren’t so introverted and independent.  I’m about as independent as a four-month-old, and Belle would probably write me off as petty and superficial while I’d find her pretentious and aloof.  Come on, Gaston.  Let’s hit up the tavern and talk of common-folk things over a cold one.  We don’t need this woman’s intellectual arrogance.  Oh, and I’m pretty sure if a seven-foot-tall beast screamed at me and asked me to join him for dinner Russell-Crowe-the-phone-thrower-style, I probably wouldn’t exhibit patience or the compassion with the power to change hearts.  I’d probably just pee my pants and die.  xo, MR