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Stop the presses. Lay down your tools. Ring out every church bell in the land so that all subjects may hear the joyous tidings: Kate Middleton is blond.

Or she might be. It’s hard to tell from the one photo somebody managed to get of her in a car the other day. But that’s never stopped the world’s media writing breathless copy about the royal family before. Some of the reactions I have read from magazines and newspapers online over the past week on the subject of Kate Middleton’s hair include: “Why blonde Princess of Wales is a beauty disruptor”; “her freshly lightened shade couldn’t be more regal”; “the Princess of Wales’ blonde hair makeover is the ultimate anti-autumn statement.” Conversely: “It’s the perfect autumn transformation.” Country and Townhouse ran with the headline “The Truth Behind Kate Middleton’s New Blonde Blow Out,” the truth of which is: It might be a different color now, we’re not sure, because there is only one photo.

Theories about the hair abound. An honest-to-god doctor of psychology weighed in on Fox News that this new hair may be Kate’s way of “reclaiming agency and visibility” in the aftermath of the illness that kept her from public duties last year and had people all over the world deliriously speculating about whether she was dead or getting a divorce. Others think the new hair color might be to make it easier to hide new crops of gray from the scrutiny of press photographers as Kate ages. She apparently spent the summer on a yacht sailing around the Greek islands (but not once, over several weeks, setting foot on any of them, for security reasons), so others think the new, lighter color may just be the effect of time in the sun. Then there is the burning question of what color, exactly, it now is. Is it blond? Honey blond? Honey brond? Mocha brond? Toffee blond? Gilded taupe? “Antique” blond, whatever that might mean? How do we know it’s not a wig? Is it temporary? Is it permanent? Is it merely a trick of the light? Does a change in hairstyle signal, as people with untold free time have claimed, that she might be about to announce a pregnancy?

I appreciate that I am myself sitting here at my computer writing about “blond Kate Middleton,” but I always find myself wondering who these media frenzies are for. Then I remember that there really are hordes of people all over the world who are interested in knowing about what precise color Kate Middleton’s hair is. I may not know any of them, you may not know any of them, but they are out there. She has, for instance, a community of stans known as the repli-Kates or copyKates who spend their time and money re-creating her outfits. When this woman wears a dress, that dress will sell out in a matter of minutes. But there are plenty more people at a less diagnosable level of interest in the princess.


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On the one hand, it is the dream of every woman who’s gone through a rough patch and decides to dye her hair blond about it that the world’s press shout this news from the rooftops. To go blond is to say: I need people to make some kind of fuss about me immediately. It is, from personal experience, a momentous occasion. And on the other, it’s fairly demented that this much attention is being paid to a woman’s hair color.

But Middleton, of course, is not just any woman. She is a woman who leads one of the strangest and most regimented lives in the world. Kate Middleton is a brunette. It is a fundamental part of her persona that she is a woman with brown hair. As my colleague put it, it might in fact be her whole persona. There’s a reason for that: Her appearance is pretty much all people are allowed of her, all that she is allowed to show. Middleton has settled so totally into the role of well-behaved figurehead of the royal family that any sense of her actual personality has been buried beneath the cashmere sweaters and respectable midi dresses. Her job is to be Kate Middleton, and to look like Kate Middleton. Going blond is about as exciting as Kate Middleton’s life is permitted to be. You’d sooner see Kate Middleton riding a mechanical bull in assless chaps than with a pixie cut. You don’t see her in so much as a skirt that shows her thighs.

I suppose I’m also thinking about this because it’s the time of year when that photograph of Diana sitting alone on a diving board circles back ’round in social media, a photograph taken just a week before she died at the end of August in 1997. Images of a princess are so valuable because to be a princess is to be reduced to an image. It’s Kate Middleton’s job to be looked at, and apparently my job as a subject of the British crown to look at Kate Middleton, a woman with nice hair that is now maybe blond. And as ever, all the looking feels weird, needless, and empty.

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