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60 free Blonde Hair trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Blonde hair trivia turns out to be a tour through genetics, ancient history, Hollywood and chemistry. This quiz opens with the science: the pigment that blondes lack, why children go darker as they grow, the 17,000-year-old Siberian fossil that carried the European blond gene, and the separate mutation that makes Solomon Islanders blond. It then asks where blondes are actually common, from the Baltic to a surprising town in Portugal, and how many adults are truly natural blondes. The middle section is history: Achilles and Menelaus in Homer, saffron-dyed Greek prostitutes, the slave name Xanthias, Messalina's wig, Tacitus on the Germans, Thor's wife Sif, Iseult le Blonde, Chaucer's Emily and Christine de Pisan. Then the modern stereotype: Rosalie Duthé and the first dumb-blonde joke, Anita Loos and Lorelei Lee, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe's real hair, Hitchcock's icy blondes, Clairol's slogan, Legally Blonde and the band Blondie. It finishes with hair-dye chemistry, the Ebers Papyrus, the founder of L'Oréal and the hoax that had the BBC announcing the extinction of blondes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on blond hair, hair colouring, the blonde stereotype and the people involved, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit anyone; the expert tier reaches Veneto conscripts and TYRP1.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Blond hair is characterised by low levels of which dark pigment?
Eumelanin
Very pale blond comes from a patchy, scarce distribution of pigment; sandy blond has a little more of it.
Q 02Why is natural blond hair significantly less common in adults than in children?
It tends to darken with age
A Greek historian noticed the same thing among the Gauls two thousand years ago, writing that their children were born with greyish hair that changed as they grew.
Q 03The English word 'blond' comes from Old French and possibly from Medieval Latin 'blundus', meaning what?
Yellow
Another French-derived colour word, brunette, works the same way in English.
Q 04In which year is the word 'blond' first documented in English?
1481
Old French blund or blont described a colour midway between golden and light chestnut.
Q 05According to Christie Davies, roughly what share of adults in Europe and North America are naturally blond?
Around 5%
A 2003 study put the figure for American adults at just four percent.
Q 06Near which sea is the pigmentation of European hair and eyes lightest?
The Baltic Sea
Darkness increases regularly and almost concentrically the further you move from that region.
Q 07The oldest fossil with the KITLG mutation for European blond hair is about 17,000 years old. Which region is it from?
Southern Siberia
The Ancient North Eurasian specimen was found at Afontova Gora; David Reich argues the allele reached Europe with steppe migrations.
Q 08Blond hair among Solomon Islands Melanesians is caused by a mutation in which gene?
TYRP1
The mutation occurs at a frequency of 26% in the Solomon Islands and evolved independently of European blondness.
Q 09Besides Europe, blond hair occurs naturally among the Berbers of which region?
North Africa
It is also found in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, and among Asian groups such as the Pamiris, Kalash and Uyghurs.
Q 10Which northern Chinese people did ancient Chinese writers describe as blond and blue-eyed?
The Hmong
Their features became darker as they migrated south into Southeast Asia; some Miao subgroups in Guizhou are still described that way.
Q 11Roughly what proportion of French women are natural blondes, according to figures in the Blond article?
About 10%
About 60% of them bleach their hair to an even lighter shade; half of all French blondes in a 2007 study were fully fake.
Q 12Ridolfo Livi's 1859-63 study of Italian conscripts found the highest rate of blondness in which region?
Veneto
Sardinia was at the other extreme with 1.7%; overall 8.2% of Italian men had blond hair.
Q 13Blond mummies of the Roman-Christian period were excavated at Fagg El Gamous in which country?
Egypt
Of the bodies with hair preserved, 54% were blondes or redheads, and burials seem to be clustered by hair colour.
Q 21Which Roman historian wrote that the Germans had fierce blue eyes, red-blond hair and huge frames?
Tacitus
Virgil likewise described the hair of the Gauls as golden, and Ammianus called almost all Gauls fair and ruddy.
Q 22In Norse mythology, which famously blond goddess is the wife of Thor?
Sif
Helga the Beautiful in the Gunnlaug Saga had blond hair so long it could envelop her entirely.
Q 23Which legendary heroine was so associated with fair hair that Chrétien de Troyes called her 'le Blonde'?
Iseult
In older versions of the tale, Tristan falls in love with her after seeing just a single lock of her hair.
Q 14In the Iliad, which hero is presented as the ideal warrior: handsome, tall, strong and light-haired?
Achilles
Peleus, Meleager and Rhadamanthys are also portrayed as fair-haired in the Homeric poems.
Q 15Which king of Sparta is portrayed as blond in the Homeric epics?
Menelaus
The Greeks were mostly dark-haired, which is why fair hair fascinated them so much.
Q 16In the Greco-Roman world, blonde hair was associated with which group, who dyed their hair with saffron?
Prostitutes
The dye was expensive, laborious to apply and smelled repugnant, but that did not stop them.
Q 17'Xanthias', meaning light-haired, was a common ancient Greek name for which class of people?
Slaves
Many Greek slaves were captured from Thrace, whose people the Greeks stereotyped as reddish-blond.
Q 18Which sculptor may have depicted Athena's hair in gold on his Athena Parthenos statue?
Pheidias
Alcman, a contemporary of Sappho, praised golden hair as one of the most desirable qualities of a beautiful woman.
Q 19Which Roman poet wrote that Messalina hid her black hair under a blond wig to visit a brothel?
Juvenal
Roman women who tried to bleach their own hair often suffered hair loss and turned to wigs made from captives' hair.
Q 20According to Suetonius, which first emperor of Rome had curly hair inclined towards golden?
Augustus
Historian Adrian Goldsworthy reads 'subflavum' as either slightly blond or simply brown rather than black.
Q 24Which princess in Chaucer's Knight's Tale has fair hair braided in a tress a yard long?
Emily
Medieval artists gave female saints long shimmering blond hair to emphasise holiness and virginity.
Q 25Which French writer wrote in 1404 that nothing is lovelier on a woman's head than beautiful blond hair?
Christine de Pisan
In Western Europe during the Middle Ages, long blonde hair was idealised as the paragon of female beauty.
Q 26A 16th-century fashion imported from where had Spanish ladies dyeing their hair blond or red instead of black?
Italy
Renaissance Italian taste for golden hair swept through Spain's courts.
Q 27Rosalie Duthé, source of the 'dumb blonde' stereotype, was satirised in a play of which year?
1775
Les Curiosités de la Foire mocked her habit of pausing a long time before speaking, making her seem literally dumb.
Q 28Which 1925 comic novel by Anita Loos follows the gold-digging flapper Lorelei Lee?
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Edith Wharton hailed it as 'the great American novel'; Loos wrote a sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, in 1927.
Q 29Anita Loos's blonde sketches were first serialised in which magazine in 1925?
Harper's Bazaar
Boni & Liveright collected them into a book that November; it has run to more than 85 editions.
Q 30Which 1933 film starring the original 'Platinum Blonde' started the blonde screen-siren stereotype?
Bombshell
Its star died at 26 of kidney failure while filming Saratoga, which MGM finished with body doubles.