Membership in Club Blonde has its privileges.

For 6-foot-plus Natalia Ilyin, one of those privileges included having a total stranger in a Brooks Brother suit drop to his knees on the Wall Street sidewalk and wail, "Oh, baby, just give me one chance."

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DARYL HANNAH This blond, blue-eyed Cro-Magnon girl from 'Clan of the Cave Bear' represents the species that will wipe out the Neanderthals who take her in as a child.
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APHRODITE Praxiteles' sculpture of the goddess of love had gilded locks, and she's been blonde ever since. Shown is Botticelli's vision: his 'The Birth of Venus.'
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LILLIAN GISH The fairy-tale blonde is reinterpreted by this modern-day princess, best known as the threatened paragon of 'white' virtue in D.W. Griffith's 'Birth of Nation.'
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MARILYN MONROE The most complex of modern blondes, she both exploited and rearranged all existing stereotypes: Shown is an Andy Warhol portrait.
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Ilyin
Joey Ivansco/Staff (ENLARGE)
Jessica Simpson is one of the latest in a long line of celebrated blondes.
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WHY BLOND CAVE WOMEN HAD MORE FUN Peter Frost, an anthropologist at Universite Laval, in Quebec, Canada, posits that the sudden spread of blond hair in northern Europe during the end of the last ice age occurred because of a variety of conditions: • Men were siphoned off (and frequently killed) in long-range hunting expeditions. • Scarce vegetation meant women could gether less food and were more dependent on men. • The male shortage put greater pressure of sexual selection on early European women. • "Rare-color" women (carrying the mutant light-hair gene) were selected more frequently as mates. Such an advantage survives as long as the hair color remains rare, says Frost. "If blond hair had been inherently attractive, sexual selection would have eventually eliminated any rival colors," he says. "There would today be fixation of blondness as the one and only hair color. Yet even in Sweden blondes make up only 30 to 40 percent of the population." HAIR COLOR AMONG AMERICAN WOMEN: • 60 percent are born brunette • 19 percent are born blond • 9 percent are true redheads • 12 percent fall within the darkest brown and black colors.

That was nice, says the honey-topped college professor, but not so out of the ordinary. "People routinely smile at me on the street for no reason," she writes in her memoir-slash-cultural critique "Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture." "Taxis stop for me when I'm not hailing them."

It's the golden rule. The chicks with the golden hair, rule.

According to a new study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, that rule has been in force since blonde was born.

The light-hair mutation appeared among our uniformly dark-haired European ancestors around 11,000 years ago, then spread rapidly in northern Europe, probably because blond females were in hot demand, according to author Peter Frost.

"Blondes benefit from a novelty effect," says Frost, by way of e-mail. "In other words, blondes have more fun because blond hair is relatively rare."

What Frost calls "rare-color advantage" has been demonstrated in fruit flies and studied in red flour beetles, parasitic wasps, guppies, ladybugs and leafroller moths.

Humans too. When male test subjects were shown a series of photographs of blond and brunette women, "the attractiveness of the same brunette increased in proportion to her rarity in the series."

Natural blondes represent only about 16 percent of the population, and amber waves of mane continue to fascinate. From Lillian Gish to blonde-of-the-minute Jessica Simpson, women fly the flaxen flag and men surrender.

Or so the story goes.

"It's more of a myth, of you getting preferential treatment," says green-eyed, natural blonde Meagan Maron, 23, a recent graduate of the University of Alabama and a member of the very blond sorority Alpha Omicron Pi.

"A lot of people do talk about it," says Maron, "but I feel at the end of the day I'm just treated like everyone else."

This is, of course, why so many women spend so much time and money (and endure pain and toxic chemicals) to create that sun-kissed look: They want to be treated just like everyone else.

Switching to blond

The folks at Clairol understand their motivation all too well. In a recent study by the hair-coloring giant, blondes were considered the "most glamorous" by 65 percent of 2,400 respondents. Nearly half of married women thought a blonde more likely to lead hubby astray. (Only 30 percent were worried about brunettes and 21 percent about redheads.)

"Every girl at some point thinks of being a blonde," says Clairol spokesperson Francine Gingras. "Some follow through with that dream."

Clairol began stoking the dream machinery 50 years ago with one of the best-known ad campaigns of all time, anchored by the provocative slogan "Does she, or doesn't she?"

Created by brassy, bottle-blonde Shirley Polykoff, the ads made sales explode. In 1956 only 7 percent of American women colored their hair; within a few years the figure jumped to more than 50 percent, where it remains today. Subsequent slogans — "Is it true blondes have more fun?" and "If I've only one life. . . let me live it as a blonde" — have seeped into the national lexicon.

What are they seeking? Heavenly status? "Blonde Like Me" author Ilyin points out that the blond archetype is as old as the myth of Isis, and that the dark-haired Greeks depicted Aphrodite, goddess of love, with golden hair. "That's where we got the halo idea, sort of."

Fair-haired announcers

But between the goddess of ancient Greece and the Madonna of the ICBM-shaped brassiere, the identity of the blonde has gone through many twists and turns. She was the paragon of feminine virtue and beauty until the latter half of the 19th century, when a radical shift began, propelled by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and their female colleagues, according to Ellen Tremper, author of "I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction and Film."

"They made the blondes the secondary characters in these books," she says. "The dark-haired woman is the heroine."

Significantly, they also made blondes disagreeable, which took them down a peg. The transformation continued in movies of the 1930s, when female leads such as Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard added physical comedy and frankly sexual appetites to the previously immobile and untouchable blond archetype.

If it sounds like the blonde was steadily changing into a human being, that's exactly Tremper's point.

Then again, the dominant culture is slow to change, and so is the attitude toward hair color. Continued reverence for champagne tresses indicates the blonde still has a toehold on that exalted throne.

In an essay titled "TV's Aryan Sisterhood," Slate writer Jack Shafer points out the predominance of fair-haired television news announcers and suggests "Someday we'll look back at the chemical blonding of hundreds of newscasters as a torture on the order of foot-binding in China."

A measure of Western blonde-worship is the recurring "disappearing blonde" myth that has circulated with regularity over the last 150 years. Reported by a credulous BBC in 2002, the story goes that the last real blonde will be born in Finland sometime 200 years from now, because gentlemen prefer bleached. Except that it's a crock. (See www.snopes.com for a discussion of the durable urban legend.)

The tale is perpetuated, says Ilyin, because "you're worried that the sun will go out."

While the sun isn't setting, it's twilight — or at least late afternoon — for the golden goddess.

Mayor changes color

One bit of evidence: sales are dropping. Clairol's most popular shade in 2001 was Nice 'n Easy No. 98, Natural Extra Light Blonde, and blond shades made up 40 percent of Clairol's sales. Last year brown shades predominated, accounting for 43 percent of sales; 33 percent of sales were blond shades.

Blond coloring is also being used in a way that makes light of the color itself, with obvious non-blondes such as RuPaul and Monica Kaufman sporting the towhead look.

When Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin colored her natural 'do canary-yellow after her 50th birthday, friends thought it was midlife crisis time. Advisors worried that the lemony hair would turn off black voters in the upcoming election.

But she wasn't trying to be "white"; she was just having fun. (And covering the gray.) The upside of the experiment: She stood out from the crowd. Franklin won convincingly.

The goldy-locks, she says, are "a lighter side to me, cause I'm fairly serious." But blonde isn't the only game in town, she adds, as witnessed by the attention given such figures as Beyoncé, Serena and Jennifer Lopez.

"There was a time when, if you were a bald-headed man, you were considered old and stodgy," says Franklin. "Then Michael Jordan comes along. Clearly there has been a major shift in terms of the images of beauty, the images of power, the images of success."

In fact, even "flaming blondes," such as Ilyin, are learning to live without the bottle. A professor of semiotics (the study of signs and symbols, including, by the way, hair) at the University of Washington in Seattle, the 48-year-old Ilyin is, post-memoir, letting her gray shine.

The change in look has prompted a change in response from the world: from lust to respect.

She is also getting the "ma'am" more often now.

She used to hate that. Now she kind of likes it. "I wanted to be young and blond, but I am loving this respect. Who knew?"