I’m a firey Irish brunette with reddish highlights. My hair is natural and I don’t color it, I don’t pamper it, I barely comb it out most days. It curls in it’s own strange ways (which differs from day to day and depends totally upon the level of humidity)…I’ve had many shades of color: Black, blue, pink, and yes, BLOND. I prefer my natural color and find this stuff to be absolutely repulsive. LOL.

MARY CASTELLANO, a transplanted Miamian whose caramel-colored hair spills past her shoulders, has never done her own highlights. But last year, the idea crossed her mind when Ms. Castellano, who is 26, realized how prohibitively expensive it had become to color her beautiful hair.

“You can’t work in fashion in this city and not look good,” explained Ms. Castellano, who is an account executive at Ogan Dallal Associates, a Manhattan public relations firm that handles clients in the fashion industry. “People check you out, and if you have black roots and your hair is fried, it doesn’t matter that you’re carrying a Bottega bag.

“When I moved here after college,” she added, “I didn’t realize that along with rent, phone and utilities, I’d have this huge expense for hair.”

For a time, she went to a string of East Side salons and paid about $500 a month for highlights and touch-ups of her long, thick hair…

(cough) (choking) FUCKING $500.00 bucks a MONTH for touch ups???? I am quite sure I have not even come close to spending that amount on my hair over my entire lifetime, nevermind for a TOUCH UP. I know it’s more expensive in NYC to live, to exist…but this is really stupid. Why do women do these things? The picture of this woman, girl actually- she is very pretty and would be just as good looking if she were her natural self. Some of my friends and people I know color their hair all the time. After years of seeing them do this I have concluded, LOL, that these women have very low self esteem. They really do. To be willing to spend THAT much. To wear all the paint and push up bras…they are not at all content with what they were born with. It’s too bad.
And don’t give me this bullshit about needing to be a blond for your job. You do it because you want to. Because you don’t like how you look naturally.

Although it’s a struggle for a young working woman, Ms. Castellano is a New York Blonde.

This polished, pedigreed creature can usually be spotted in her natural habitat, the Upper East Side, dropping off her offspring at the Episcopal School, scrutinizing embroidered 480-thread-count sheets at Pratesi and sipping drinks at La Goulue.

Some days she migrates south of 57th Street to SoHo or the meatpacking district or the sole bastion of chic in Times Square, the Condé Nast building. If she is an especially free-spirited member of the flock, she may actually live in Greenwich Village or on the Upper West Side, but this is rare, though not as rare as those who make their nests across the pond in Brooklyn Heights or — gasp! — Park Slope.

How special. We have classes of NY blondes. I was a blond once in my life. I hated it because although I got lots of LOOKS and oohs and ahhs, I knew it wasn’t ME and I was presenting myself in a way that was fake. Most folks who know me know how I feel about the virtues of being REAL vs. being PHONEY. AND the time I had to spend, making this fake head of hair LOOK good…was just too much for me. Anything more than a minute is too much as far as I’m concerned.

The New York Blonde may work at a fashion magazine, a public relations company or an art gallery, places where spending a morning getting one’s roots touched up is not considered grounds for firing. Or she may be a high-powered executive on Wall Street or Madison Avenue, settings where precisely highlighted blond hair is as potent a power accessory as a bespoke suit or an Audemars Piguet watch.

She may have made a career simply out of shopping, getting oxygen facials and taking classes in screenwriting. Without question, however, she has a weakness for cushion-cut diamonds and espresso macchiato at Sant Ambroeus on upper Madison Avenue.

I guess I’m certainly that steerage class woman because I cannot imagine wasting my days shopping. For foreign made, ugly ass watches that these people fondle with and get aroused over. And show off. How boring can life get when all you have to show for yourself is your possessions such as this?

The Many Faces of Blonde

Do not confuse New York (upper-case) Blondes with New York (lower-case) blondes, a more ubiquitous breed that is too busy going to work, shopping for groceries, getting the dishwasher repaired and watching “Grey’s Anatomy” to worry about whether their caramel streaks have become brassy or their dark roots will show up in photographs on NewYorkSocialDiary.com, a blog that chronicles the society set. New York (lower-case) blondes lighten their hair over the bathroom sink or have it highlighted at a salon that doesn’t serve cappuccino or present you with a bill that is only slightly more modest than airfare to Paris.

I’m sitting here shaking my head in dispair that this article is probably being taken so seriously by so many. All this talk of lower class and upper class blondom makes me want to be sick.

The Price They Pay

The pedigree of the New York Blonde goes back at least 40 years, to the days when a covey of well-dressed, well-tressed socialites like C. Z. Guest and Nan Kempner were the reigning fashion doyennes. These women would stop by some flossy East Side salon for a “comb-out” (the 60’s equivalent of a blow-out) before lunching at now-shuttered water holes like La Caravelle and La Côte Basque. In their trim suits, gloves and alligator pumps, they were the style setters of their day, and their perfectly cut and sprayed coiffures were often colored shades like ash or platinum.

Today, you hardly hear the word platinum associated with hair. But the New York Blonde’s obsession with her hair is, if anything, more powerful than ever. Although the cut may be a simple classic style — no messy, razored layers, no tacky imitations of Mischa Barton — the hair itself looks like something Botticelli would have done had he worked in a posh Manhattan salon and charged $300 for highlights. Delicate ribbons of flax are intertwined with streaks of vanilla and threads of gold strategically placed over a honey-toned base to create a silky, shiny, better-than-natural-looking head of hair that silently telegraphs “high-priced,” “high class” and, most of all, “high maintenance.”

How gay sounding. And the end results do look nice, for sure. But that doesn’t make it right to be so deceptive. But I can’t really judge those who do this. All I can do is be grateful that I don’t need this stuff to feel good about myself.

A Slave to Her Salon

The price of being a New York Blonde is also measured in time.

“I think the really chic ones are in the salon every two weeks, because your roots start growing out the minute you leave the salon,” Ms. Sykes said. “The girls who look good are there every four weeks, and the ones who don’t look so good are there every two months.”

But even if a salon appointment is every six weeks, the effort required to constantly look this beautiful can be exhausting.

“It might sound like fun to the ordinary woman, but it requires enormous discipline and commitment to chase the perfect the way New York Blondes do,” said Natalia Ilyin, a cultural critic, echoing the title of her newest book, “Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time.” Ms. Ilyin, who is also the author of “Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture,” added: “Going to the salon is not a fun thing you do once in a while. It’s part of an identity that you have to keep up.”

Part of an identity you have to keep up?
NO thanks. I am who I am and I won’t change that no matter how much more “fun” blonds have. I know gentlemen prefer blonds. Heh. I don’t attract gentlemen and I’m proud of that. I attract rough men who work in dangerous professions and who like their women to be real, honest and robust. That’s me. I wouldn’t trade that for anything or any amount of money in this world. Being who we are, without the phoney “enhancements” is a principle I value highly.