Basic Trope: A character with dark hair is highly intelligent.
- Straight: Alice has brown hair and gets the highest grades in her class.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice's hair is so rich in color that it's almost black and her intellect is so high as to make her an Asian and Nerdy TV Genius with an Improbably High I.Q..
- Alice is The Chessmaster.
- Downplayed: Alice is a brunette who is very smart, but not in comparison to some other characters, who are redheads or blondes or gingers, who are super geniuses.
- Justified:
- Alice finds her brown hair to be plain so she quietly goes about her business putting her effort into academics.
- Or people with dark hair in the story are given some sort of Applied Phlebotinum that makes them intelligent.
- Inverted:
- If characters know that something needs to be done that's morally questionable and also physically challenging, they call on the brown-haired Dumb Muscle.
- Or Alice is a Brainless Beauty who has chestnut hair. She doesn't mind when she doesn't understand her schoolwork because if she asks a male classmate with a smile and compliment to his intelligence, she can practically get him to do the work for her.
- Gender Inverted: Bob has brown hair and gets the highest grades in his class.
- Subverted: Alice gets terrible grades, but is merely Book Dumb, just like a bunch of her peers.
- Double Subverted:
- But it turns out she was really just Obfuscating Stupidity and reveals herself to be an Insufferable Genius to boot.
- ...until it turns out she is smart, but just too lazy to apply it to her studies.
- Parodied:
- After an IQ test, the highest scoring students immediately have their hair dyed brown.
- All the smart kids have brown or black hair.
- Or Betty wishes to be smart like Alice, so she decides to dye her hair dark brown to look smart. She becomes a TV Genius overnight.
- ...or Betty, after she dyes her hair, starts acting like a TV Genius when she clearly doesn't know what she's talking about and everyone except for Alice acts as if she's the smartest kid in class. Alice is not amused.
- Zig Zagged: Alice is smart, but switches between blonde and brown hair so often that no one can be sure what is her actual hair colour.
- Averted: Hair color has no correlation to intelligence.
- Enforced: The Smart Guy has brown hair so that people can identify him as the smart guy immediately.
- Lampshaded: "You can tell she's the smart one," said Bob. "Her hair says so,"
- Invoked: "Of course I can win the spelling bee! I'm a brunette!"
- Exploited: The team needs a smart guy, and they know hiring a brunette is their best bet.
- Defied: Alice deliberately becomes Book Dumb in order to shun the stereotype of being a bookish nerd because of her brown hair.
- Discussed: 'We might as well tell Alice about the problem and see what she thinks. She's the brunette around here, so she's bound to have some insight.'
- Conversed: "Weird. Alice and Charlie both have dark hair and they're both really smart".
- Deconstructed: Because Alice has dark hair, she constantly strives to become intelligent because people expect that of her.
- Reconstructed: But deep down, Alice just wants to be herself. She dyes her hair blue and keeps her intelligent personality.
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