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Lucy Pinder Tops the World’s Brunettes List

Lucy Pinder was named the world’s sexiest brunette, an accolade that put her at the top of one of the genre’s favourite kinds of ranking.

The men’s magazine era ran on lists. Hot hundreds, readers’ polls, calendar countdowns and themed rankings gave editors a reliable way to fill a special issue and gave readers something to argue about for weeks. Hair colour was a perennial theme: blondes, brunettes and redheads each had their own tables, and topping one of them was treated as a headline in its own right.

That is the context for this accolade. A ranking like “world’s sexiest brunette” is not a formal award with a jury and a trophy. It is a piece of popular culture, a snapshot of who readers and editors were talking about at a particular moment. Being placed first in such a list signalled that a model had reached the very front of the glamour conversation.

Why lists mattered

For fans, rankings were a way of keeping score and of discovering names they had not followed before. For the magazines, they were among the best-selling issues of the year. And online, they became some of the most linked-to pages in glamour fandom, which is why this address still sees visitors long after the original post disappeared.

The original images and list material belong to their publishers and are not reproduced here. This page keeps a short editorial record of the ranking and its place among the calendars and lists of the period.

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