New Delhi: The blonde vs brunette is the oldest American beauty war. Now, actor Jennifer Aniston has revealed that she is a natural brunette, despite her signature honey dirty blonde locks. Aniston joins a long list of actresses like Marilyn Monroe and Reese Witherspoon, who understood early on that blonde in Hollywood is a very profitable look.
“I was a natural brunette,”said Aniston in an Instagram video for her hair care brand, LolaVie. Gesturing to her lighter hue hair, she said,“This is fake.”
Her Friends co-star Courteney Cox enters the frame saying, “Here, this is what she looks like, brunette”, before she frames her dark hair over Aniston’s head.
“That’s black,” Aniston said. But, upon Cox’s insistence, she corrects herself saying, “It’s dark…Oh, this is like the Horrible Bosses character I played.”
Notably, in the 2011 comedy, Aniston, who played the dentist, Dr Julia Harris, wore a dark brown wig. She was also part of the 2014 sequel, Horrible Bosses 2.
In August 2025, the actor told Vanity Fair that she “fought” for the wig she wore in Horrible Bosses.
Since her breakthrough with Friends, Aniston has been almost inseparable from her signature dirty-blonde shade, sometimes pin-straight, sometimes in a bob. Her hair, in fact, became and remains a cultural obsession. Which is why the brunette look for Horrible Bosses caught everyone completely off guard.
Later in the Instagram video, Aniston admitted that if given a chance, she would go back to the brunette look.
Within 8 hours, the video racked up over 11.8 million views. But the comments section couldn’t stop talking about how Aniston’s hair has its own fan club.
“Jen’s hair isn’t just hair, it’s a lifestyle,” a fan wrote. Another said, “Jen’s hair deserves its own spin-off show.”
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Hollywood stars cashed in on blonde looks
It was Marilyn Monroe who first set the template in the 1950s. Monroe was a brunette, but when she bleached her hair platinum, she gave herself cinematic immortality. Blonde became her brand, which industry happily cashed in on.
Decades later, Reese Witherspoon followed a softer but equally effective version of the playbook. Her early films, like the debut project The Man in the Moon (1991) and Cruel Intentions (1999) saw her with a darker hair colour. But once blonde, her career surged. The 2001 film Legally Blonde didn’t just make fun of stereotypes; it monetised them, with Witherspoon turning the ‘dumb blonde’ perception into a career-defining moment. The film is a perfect example of Hollywood’s perception of the symbolic personality traits attributed to hair colour. In American pop culture, brunettes are nerdy and serious, whereas blondes are dumb and just “have more fun.”
Rachel McAdams, also a natural brunette, found immortality as a blonde in the 2004 cult classic Mean Girls. While Regina George’s glossy, long, pin-straight golden hair was iconic and lent the character her mean girl energy, McAdams’ Allie Hamilton from The Notebook (2004) sported soft waves in a dirty blonde hue.
American singer and reality TV star Gwen Stefani, naturally brown-haired, credits her shift to platinum blonde as the moment everything changed for her career.
In a 2014 interview, the Grammy winner told Teen Vogue that when she first fully bleached her hair blonde, it was right after a break-up. Hence, she didn’t care about the cost and went all-in.
“I remember my boyfriend, and I had just broken up, and I was like ‘I don’t care how much it costs, I’m getting my hair bleached! That’s really when everything changed,” Stefani said, adding that the process made her feel like she had arrived and finally became herself.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)