Society Sees Red

I've always had a jones for redheads.

Which is no big shakes, societally-speaking. But as I waited to pick up my kids at the movie theatre the other day, I noticed something for the first time in my poster-observing life; nearly every leading lady in nearly every poster was a redhead.

New trend?

Blondes have, of course, been the big ticket in movies since time immemorial, and brunettes are all over the place too. But redheads in movies always seemed a rare thing.

And yet from Lindsay Lohan to Julianne Moore to Kate Winslet to Nicole Kidman, redheads seem to be in vogue right now. Not just in the movies, either - "Grace" and "Roz" and many other redheads dot the TV screens.

You're even seeing redheaded TV news anchors and correspondents; consultants used to relentlessly hound them into blond-or-brunette dye jobs; if even broadcast consultants - reactionary enough to make Kim Jong-Il look like a Berkeley hippie - are on board, it must be a trend.

Maybe more tellingly, redheads seem to be popping up in a lot more advertisements. And they seem to be depicting objects of desire in advertising, in a way that, as long as I can remember, has been the province of the va va voom blonde or the exotic brunette.

Apparently not everyone shares this view - but I think there's something to it.