What shade is Kell’s hair?

[Kingsdaughter613]

There are a LOT of different shades of blond hair. Kell is usually pictured with a yellow blond or flax blond, but he has ash blond on the cover of Secret History. It makes me wonder: what shade of blond is his hair? I like ash, but what do you all think?

 

I actually know people who have most of these colors naturally. My childhood BF had white blond, and my little sister had copper blond/golden blond/honey blond depending on the time of year. (She had weird hair; don’t ask.) I’ve seen just about every shade between.
 

There are more variants than listed here, but some of them are almost never found naturally so I didn’t list them. Others were just too close to the ones listed. Feel free to suggest them though!

Edited October 27, 2020 by Kingsdaughter613

[Frustration]

Obviously either copper or gold.

[Kingsdaughter613]

35 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Obviously either copper or gold.

I like your reasoning, lol. My choice of ash is for similar thematic reasons - and because it suited him well on the SH cover. It also means his hair resembles the mist... 

I honestly think Copper is too close to red/brown for Vin to think of it as blond. Otherwise I love that color for him, as it’s basically red-gold. One of the most stunning hair colors out there, IMO.

Gold definitely fits him. In the mist he’d almost look like he had a halo. Lol.

[Winter Wolf]

The weird thing is that I always picture him as a brunette even though I "know" he's blonde. 

[Kingsdaughter613]

1 hour ago, Winter Wolf said:

The weird thing is that I always picture him as a brunette even though I "know" he's blonde. 

It took me forever to fix my head picture. I still can’t see him with yellow hair, which may be why I like the SH cover so much. I used to go with strawberry or copper blonde, but now headcannon the ash blonde he has there.

[Kingsdaughter613]

It’s apparently a light blond, per my Mistborn reread. Which... is still a huge range. It does eliminate honey and copper though, both of which are too dark. It can arguably eliminate pure yellow and gold, which usually aren’t described as ‘light’ due to the depth of the hues. 
 

That leaves regular flax blond, strawberry, dirty, sandy, and ash, with platinum and white remaining unlikely possibilities. The lighter version of yellow, straw, becomes an option as well.

I need to put up pictures at some point.

[Kingsdaughter613]

23 minutes ago, More Cynical Than Funny said:

I know I'm opening a can of worms but does Kelsier have facial hair? I always thought so but some say no. (I always pictured him with a goatee)

He wears a fake beard at a certain point, and Vin makes no note of any when she does with others. So I’d guess not, or very little. Most of the cover art or semi-official art depicts him without. 

[Kingsdaughter613]

2 minutes ago, More Cynical Than Funny said:

It's weird, half of the time he does half of the time he doesn't!

By semi-official I meant the pictures people are hired to draw, not the fan images Brandon includes in the leather bounds. So the SH cover, interior art in AU, the Role-playing and board game art.

[Spren of Kindness]

I usually picture him with honey blond hair, sometimes ash blond.  It's rather nebulous.

[ftl]

On 11/17/2020 at 4:40 PM, Kingsdaughter613 said:

It’s apparently a light blond, per my Mistborn reread. Which... is still a huge range. It does eliminate honey and copper though, both of which are too dark. It can arguably eliminate pure yellow and gold, which usually aren’t described as ‘light’ due to the depth of the hues. 

Also worth noting that colors in Mistborn are gonna be a bit weird, because of the omnipresent ash. There's a WoB example of how what they'd call "white" is probably what we'd call a light grey, which is as good as they could do under the circumstances.

 

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

Elend's White Uniform

Another interesting item to note is that Vin mentions how Elend's uniform was as white as they could get it. Some readers ask how it would be possible to keep clothing white in such circumstances.

My answer is much along the lines of what Vin says here. If you, from our world, were to go and look at Elend's uniform, I doubt you'd call it white. Probably a light grey. However, compared to the world around it, it's very white. This is all relative. What the characters see is a brilliant white uniform, even though we would describe it differently.

The Hero of Ages Annotations (Sept. 1, 2009)

And of course, the humans had been biologically changed to live in a world of ash, so their range of normal hair colors might not have been the same as ours - who knows how "light" their "light blond" really is.

So it's an even bigger range of possibilities than it seems at first.

[Kingsdaughter613]

19 hours ago, ftl said:

Also worth noting that colors in Mistborn are gonna be a bit weird, because of the omnipresent ash. There's a WoB example of how what they'd call "white" is probably what we'd call a light grey, which is as good as they could do under the circumstances.

 

And of course, the humans had been biologically changed to live in a world of ash, so their range of normal hair colors might not have been the same as ours - who knows how "light" their "light blond" really is.

So it's an even bigger range of possibilities than it seems at first.

Well, this all started because pure yellow should not be a possible color.