She's the ice-blonde character on everybody's lips, but just what is it like to have Khaleesi hair in the real world? Joanna McGarry and Harriet Walker recall their platinum blonde former lives...

Joanna McGarry, beauty director

Where does Danearys Targaryan (or ‘My Khaleesi’ as she’s known in our house) hide her colourist? Behind the dragon enclave? Does she nip off for a quick roots top up before or after taking siege of an entire city? I mean, it’s pretty clear she’s not a natural ice-blonde; her grey-brown brows and olive, sand-blown skin are proof of that.

That’s the sort of inane thought process that trails through your mind during Game of Thrones if you are - or have at one time - been a platinum blonde. Only you and you alone know that maintaining that crystal-fine hair colour is a real slog. It sort of has to be or everyone would do it. 

And yet, it feels SO GOOD. I have been platinum blonde four separate times in my life, for two years at a time – that’s the only way you can do it, really. After a couple of years of bleaching, the ensuing hair damage (inch long stubs where your hair has snapped clean off) becomes too much and you are forced to admit defeat (defeat being, dyeing your hair an unremarkable shade of mousey brown and cutting as much off as you can bear). Platinum hair is a glass of delicious and ludicrously expensive champagne; decadent, subversive and fun while it lasts but be greedy with it and you’ll be left with a not so fun legacy.

But its gifts are plentiful - particularly if you are an otherwise unexceptional 18 year old with a penchant for wearing men’s skateboarding jeans. That Jerome Russell home bleaching kit ignited something in me that effectively built a bridge between my adolescence and my adulthood. I became impulsive, unpredictable, passionate, nihilistic even and it drew a particular group of people to me that I hadn’t known of before. I fell in love. I started to know myself.

"Every profound memory, every stirring photo of my twenties is painted by the ivory blonde of my hair"

In subsequent years, I dyed my hair black, auburn, red and even tried to settle with ‘natural blonde highlights’, which is kind of what I have now, but as a resolute early twenty-something, I despised it for its mediocrity. Platinum hair was my thing, it belonged to me. My friends associated me with it, and chastised me when I deigned to consider going back to my roots. It’s a funny thing, how you become your appearance. Every profound memory, every stirring photo of my twenties is painted by the ivory blonde of my hair – I’m not that girl now but I would have wanted to be around her too.

You see, there’s some voodoo magic in those pigment-less follicles, some witchcraft. It’s not just the eye-catching visual biology of it, but the ideology too – bleaching all the natural colour from your hair, to be left with a silvery white, uniformed non-colour, a ghostly sheet of paper, alludes to a certain sort of effrontery; it’s both innately vulnerable and fragile, but bolshy and plucky too. I was – I am – all of those things. It’s almost intimidatingly modern, but also has a Pagan sort of ancientness about it. It’s at once Nordic, Scandinavian, mythical, spiritual, superficial, shallow, dead and alive.

Still, if you set aside the laborious task of topping up your roots every month as well as battling to maintain that ice-blonde tone via a slew of blue granny shampoos and mousses, it’s got its practicalities. Platinum blonde looks ace in photos. It just does. The camera flash seems to spark it up just so, so that in an ensemble photograph, you’ll stand out like a lamppost against the night sky. It’s highly unlikely my boyfriend would have spotted me in a dark club one night without that glitzy beacon of blonde.

Ditto make-up. Make-up looks so good with platinum hair; it’s the ultimate canvas. There are rules though; 1. Never do eyes and lips together (unless it’s a gentle snake of liquid liner a la Mailyn Monroe), 2. Perfect your base – bleached blonde hair has a habit of exposing every single pore or burst blood vessel, 3. Avoid pink – this last one may just be for my own sanity, but the idea is to avoid Barbie connotations not encourage them. Sure, I’ve noticed that men are less interested in me when I darken my hair, but it’s nice to be hidden away sometimes. Bleached hair is unforgivingly striking; you’re out on parade at all times. It can wear you out a bit. She’s a cruel mistress, platinum hair, but one which I have no doubt in my mind of tip-toeing back into the arms of one day.

Harriet Walker, news editor

I look back on my time of having Khaleesi hair as a sort of second childhood. When I was little, I had long golden ringlets that fell to below my shoulders and moved people I didn’t know to comment on them rapturously on the bus. They grew out into straight-with-a-cowlick mousy brown, my first indication of how cruel the universe could be.

So imagine my surprise and Proustian sense of well-being, when twenty years later, after spending 7 long hours having my by-now highlighted hair turned platinum (that’s equivalent to a day in the office), the reactions on public transport were pretty much the same.

Not quite the same. No-one chucked my chin or winked at me. But there was a perceptible in-breath, especially in the first few days after I dyed it – when it was Khaleesi cool, perfectly silver, long, lustrous and sheeny grey, almost blue against my already pale skin, with no hint of roots or of the scalp-scorching time spent in the backwash to achieve it.

People looked. That isn’t an arrogant thing to say. Every woman knows the power of appearance, how it causes people to interact with you in different ways, how it invites men and women both to appraise you, to notice you. I hadn’t dyed my hair for that reason, but it was an interesting by-product. People don’t tend to look twice at me; I am not a stunning person. But with Khaleesi hair, I could approximate one.

But the interesting thing was that the attention wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t leery, and it felt very pure. I suppose I was startling rather than sexy. I definitely wasn’t ‘fit’. But if there’s something realistic in the Game of Thrones narrative, that free men and slaves alike feel a magnetic pull to follow Daenerys Targaryen in her mission to reclaim not only a throne but some semblance of humanity in a ruthless and bloodthirsty world, make no mistake it’s because of her hair, not her dragons.

Transpose Khaleesi to real life and a woman with long, silvery platinum hair stands out against the murk of London streets. It was eye-catching and it was a statement; strangers of both genders stopped me in the street to tell me that they thought my hair was beautiful or to ask – I hope you don’t think I’m being rude – whether it was natural. Children in tube carriages stared and tugged on their mother’s sleeves; I couldn’t tell if they were scared or not.

I only had one bad reaction, when a drunk man asked me if I was wearing an eighteenth century powdered wig. It struck me as quite a highbrow neg so I didn’t really mind, plus I had tied it back in a black ribbon, so any comparisons with Voltaire I had brought on myself.

It felt like a beauty apotheosis for me and my Celtic colouring. This was it, I thought. This was the reason I don’t suntan. I’m supposed to be this cosmically coiffed beautiful ‘other’, whose hairline and outline chameleon against the pre-dawn sky. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t golden-skinned, my hair made me look and feel luminous. It didn’t matter that I had a tendency to pinkness either. It all just seemed to work.

"strangers of both genders stopped me in the street to tell me that they thought my hair was beautiful"

How wrong I was. I was shocked to see, within two weeks, that even a barely there root suddenly stood out against my scalp like a five o’clock shadow. They seemed to get darker by the day. Not that it really mattered because platinum hair, when not being Khaleesi-ish, is also all about the Debbie Harry regrowth. But it shattered the illusion somewhat.

Within three months, my tinder-dry haystack of hair had gone a dirty fingernail shade of yellow, had the consistency of candy-floss and began breaking off in chunks. When the back section snapped to about an inch long, I had it all cut off and dyed dark. I have never felt more mortal.