Are Swedes really tall, blonde and blue-eyed?
When you think about the Swedes, do you see someone who's tall, blonde and blue-eyed? That stereotypical image is very much alive but not necessarily true.
When it comes to height, Swedes rank roughly in the top ten of the tallest populations in the world but Sweden is consistently ranked behind countries like The Netherlands and Germany.
For hair color, statistically speaking, there are no recent figures on the number of light or dark haired people in Sweden as no such data is ever recorded.
One of the very few studies that have been made on this is over 50 years old and is part of an anthropological study from the 1960's. The study concluded that somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of Swedes were light haired, but not necessarily blonde.
According to Karl Olov Arnstberg ,an ethnologist who has studied Swedish and Scandinavian mentality extensively, the blonde stereotype probably originates from the overgeneralization of Sweden's many blonde and blue-eyed movie and pop stars.
