Men really do prefer blondes, according to a controversial new book which could boost peroxide sales among those looking to find love.
Extracts from Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters have been made available on the Psychology Today website
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The book's authors, Satoshi Kanazawa and Alan Miller, claim that "evolutionary logic" underpins the female aspiration to look like Barbie.
The academics argue that male preferences are governed by their desire to mate with young, healthy, fertile women.
Many women born blonde turn brunette by the time they reach early adulthood and so men associate blonde hair with youth and fecundity.
Women with a low waist-to-hip ratio are preferred because they find it easier to conceive.
There is a similar explanation of the male obsession with large breasts. A Polish study found that big-breasted women with small waists are the most fertile.
However, Kanazawa and Miller accept that the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery is rendering these indicators unreliable.
"Men can cognitively understand that many blonde women with firm, large breasts are not actually 15 years old, but they still find them attractive because their evolved psychological mechanisms are fooled by modern inventions that did not exist in the ancestral environment," they write.
