Spanish Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers, students and Spanish language enthusiasts in general wanting to discuss the finer points of the language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
So I'm doing Duolingo and I just reviewed the To Be section and they had many examples of phrases similar to
He is blonde / Él es rubio
This makes sense to me as someone is intrinsically "naturally blonde". I do however, wonder, if someone dyes his hair blonde, do we say
Él está rubio
to show that it's temporary?
No, if someone dyes their hair, "es" is still used.
Mi amiga se ha teñido el pelo. Ahora es pelirroja.
// My friend has dyed her hair. Now she's redhead.
There is no distinction. If you dye your hair, that's your new color now.
Antes de teñirme el pelo, yo era rubio.
// Before I dyed my hair, I was blonde.
Era = imperfect tense of Ser.
In the phrase "he is blonde", is indicates the current state of his hair. If he dyes it, you could say "he's now redheaded" (ya es pelirrojo) or "he went redhead" (se volvió pelirrojo), but you don't point to the dying process every time you refer to his hair in the future. You can explicitly say "he used to be dark haired" or similar, but otherwise you just change the color itself: "he is deal haired/redheaded/etc". It's the same in spanish.
