From the American sweetheart to the platinum ice queen, and Jean Harlow to Sydney Sweeney, the blonde bombshell has been a multi-faceted - and controversial - figure in popular culture.

Women's hair has long been endowed with an intoxicating power, from the snake-headed Medusa of Greek mythology, whose arresting appearance turned victims to stone, to Victorian paintings of wavy-haired temptresses and gothic predators, with wild, untamed locks. Embodied by heavily made-up femme fatales such as Theda Bara and Louise Glaum, the predominantly dark-haired "vamp" made her way into the early films of the 1920s, until the advent of hair bleach saw her elbowed out by a bold new cultural icon: the platinum blonde, her immaculate coiffure glowing from the monochrome film.

A new book, British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Postwar Britain, by cultural historian Lynda Nead, examines how the bleached blonde became a complex symbol of both desirability and danger, from her US origins, most famously personified by Marilyn Monroe, to her diverse British incarnations such as Diana Dors and Barbara Windsor. "Blondeness seemed to be so significant, it wasn't just a little detail that you could ignore, it seemed to me what was defining these familiar faces and images," Nead, who is Professor of History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, tells the BBC.

Western culture, she says, has built a whole mythology around female blondeness − from religious iconography and fairy tales, to art and advertising − that has told specific stories about what it means to be blonde. In cinema's early years, comedies such as Platinum Blonde (1931) and Bombshell (1933), starring Jean Harlow, embedded concepts of the dazzling, devastatingly beautiful blonde into the cultural vernacular. "The idea that you're a bombshell, it's almost like a weapon," says Nead. "On the one hand, it is this kind of ideal, but at the same time, it's also threatening."

Before Harlow, there was another − more natural-looking − blonde on the scene: Mary Pickford, whose amber curls helped earn her the moniker of "America's Sweetheart". But while Pickford played the guileless girl waiting to be rescued, Harlow's peroxide blonde was more empowered, paving the way for fair-haired femme fatales of 1940s film noir such as Veronica Lake and Barbara Stanwyck, who played alluring but devious women who used their charm and wits to manipulate men.

Blonde Ice (1948), starring Leslie Brooks as a cold-hearted adulterer, fraudster and murderer, would capitalise on the popularity of the "blonde ice queen" trope − the protagonist's halo of golden hair at odds with her dark intentions. It was a construct revisited in the thriller Basic Instinct (1992), where Sharon Stone plays the calculating Catherine Tramell, the suspect in a murder case who succeeds in seducing her interrogator.

Blonde hair, which tends to darken with age, suggests a radiance and a childlike innocence that facilitates the........

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