Back in the day when I was a fifteen year old teenager I didn’t have a boyfriend. My problem? I had short mousy brown hair. At least that was the conclusion I came to.  And the solution? It was obvious, I had to grow my hair and bleach it blonde. Well, it took me about eighteen months to grow it to a decent length, and then I took the plunge and bleached it. And it went green. I didn’t leave the bathroom, except to phone my friend’s dad who was a chemist. I can’t remember what he told me to do now, but it worked, or at least it got rid of the green and replaced it with a rather odd brown, and I didn’t get a boyfriend.

Why did I think that blonde hair would do the trick?  Coming across some old Diana annuals on eBay last year I realised why. In the mid 1960‘s blonde hair was a big deal. Take a look at my collection of Diana annual covers from 1965 top 1975.

As a collection they now look rather fetchingly retro, but back then I firmly believe they did me a lot of damage, or at least to my hair. Even now I’m acutely aware of how many blondes persist in all kinds of advertising, especially in hair salons of course, but disturbingly on birthday cards for little girls. Have you noticed that if they feature a girl on the card, she almost always has blonde hair? At least Disney has made an effort and features girls with hair of all colours, so thank you Disney for that. I often wonder if Princess Diana (born 1961) was given any of these annuals at Christmas. I bet she was.