With regard to my assertion that blond haired, blue eyed White women has been the foremost standard of physical beauty in the USA and "perhaps in other Western countries", by using the key words "blond standard of beauty" in the google search engine, I found numerous articles that confirm this position.

Here is a longish excerpt from one of those articles:

Wilson, M. (in press) Pale Perfection: White Women in Pursuit of an Aryan Ideal. In Jhana Sen Xian (Ed.) Skin Trading. Women, Class, and Skin Color.

http://condor.depaul.edu/~mwilson/multicult/white.html

"...Most of the other (White) girls in our neighborhood took similar measures to lighten their hair. In addition, many of us had mothers who regularly dyed their hair blond, albeit they had it professionally done at beauty salons. This blonding was never anything we analyzed at the time; it was just something we did because we thought it made us look prettier.

Today, though, I reflect more deeply on why and where my desire for blond hair (and blue eyes) originated. According to Marina Warner, author of From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairly Tales and Their Tellers, blondeness has long been associated with women who were idolized and adored. Dating back to the ninth century, Homer first described the Goddess of Love's tresses as being xanthe, or golden. From the fifteenth century onward, the Virgin Mary was frequently portrayed in artwork as being a blond, even by Italians such as Botticelli who painted Aphrodite rising from the sea wearing only blond hair. Many Black Madonnas, including the statue of Monstserrat in Spain, are similarly portrayed with blond hair. John Milton's classic seventeenth century work Paradise Lost also describes Eve --
the ultimate Western symbol of femininity -- as possessing "golden tresses." Even in most fairy tales, the "fair" maiden nearly always had blond hair. In fact, throughout much of Western literature, blondes have been overly represented as angels, saints, and goddesses.1 Such was the media influence of its day.

The notion that blond women might also be simmering reportedly first appeared -- at least in this country -- during the late nineteenth century, after a troupe of peroxided erotic dancers from England came to tour. 2 Gradually, the stereotype that blonds were sexually charged, and not just virginal, began to take hold. Later, Hollywood also did its part to fuel the fantasy of blonds being hot with the introduction of such bombshells as Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow, and Marilyn Monroe. In more recent years, there have been dozens of other top blond stars, including Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Melanie Griffith, Daryl Hannah, Kim Basinger, Ellen Barkin, Elizabeth Shue, and Sharon Stone. But it was the brilliant campaign slogan "Blondes have more fun," that first appeared in the sixties for Clairol hair products, that really promoted the image of blonds as superior, fun-loving kind of women.3

The power of this more recent image of blond haired women is reflected in the findings of one social psychological study on first impressions. When White male and female research participants were asked to form judgements about different White woman, stereotypes emerged as a function of their hair color. That is, when a woman was brunette, she was judged to be intelligent, ambitious, and sincere, but when she was blond, she was judged to beautiful, delicate, dangerous, and unpredictable.4

Interestingly, the association of danger and unpredictability with blond hair may have been shaped by Hollywood, as well. The casting of such blond beauties as Lauren Bacall as the femme fatale in the film noire classic The Big Sleep (1946) may have led some viewers to re-evaluate their notions of blonds as calculating. And there have been other murderous blonds since then including Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992).

Yet blonds are also sometimes stereotyped as stupid and shallow, as reflected in the recent rash of dumb blond jokes. According to cultural critic Camille Paglia, however, such jokes are best be understood as a way of rectifying the many social advantages conferred on women with "blond ambition." That is, such put downs serve to be put blond women who might otherwise be too powerful back in their place...

The belief that being in possession of blue eyes and blond hair is a good thing is additionally indicated by one of the few studies specifically exploring feature preferences among Whites. In a 1994 article, Lora Jacobi and Thomas Cash reported that 91.3 percent of White women with blue eyes thought that blue eyes were ideal, with a whopping 87 percent of them believing that men thought so, too. Interestingly, in reality, only 37.9 percent of men claimed that their beauty ideal was a woman with blue eyes. Among non-blued eye women, only 15.2 percent rated blue eyes as ideal, but still an impressive 78.3 percent of them believed that men preferred their girlfriends to have blue eyes. A similar pattern emerged around hair color. Among those with blond hair, 92.9 percent rated blond hair as ideal, with half believing that men thought so, too. In reality, 34.8 percent of men said they preferred women with blond hair. Among brunettes, only 19.1 percent rated blond hair as ideal, but 45.8 percent nonetheless thought that men liked blond hair the best. In other words, while thankfully most of the White female respondents in the study appeared to be satisfied with the color of their own features, many of them nonetheless still assumed that men desired them to look specifically Nordic in appearance. Interestingly, a gender difference in preference beliefs also emerged in the data such that 84 percent of all the female participants, regardless of their own hair color, believed that men preferred blonde women, but only 49 percent of the male participants believed that women preferred blond men...

Although the Jacobi and Cash study was conducted on a US college population, the preference for blond hair and blue eyes is hardly limited to Whites living in this country. For example, in Italy, despite the renown of such Sicilian beauties as Sophia Loren, it is the northern Italian women with their blond hair and blue eyes who are considered by many to be the most desirable. The same preference for fair featured women holds throughout many countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In particular, the darkness of Gypsies is deemed undesirable in this area of the world. It is also understood by many of those of the Jewish faith there that the comment, "She doesn't look Jewish," especially when referring to a woman with light colored hair and eyes, is nearly always meant as a compliment. Even in South America, where much of the indigenous population has brown skin and dark eyes, a disturbingly high percentage of its female pop culture stars (e.g. Brazil's Xuxa) and models look more like they originated from a Scandinavian nation than a Latino one...

-snip-

This article goes on to address attitudes regarding skin color among Black people, among other subjects.