The Bizarrely Specific Haircut of Popular Paperback Writers

Sandra Brown, Nora Roberts, Janet Evanovich and Jayne Ann Krentz.

Aside from being names that practically no one reading this will be familiar with, what do these women have in common?

Combined, they've written more best-sellers than you'll ever conceive of sitting down to read.

Janet Evanovich writes a best-selling series about a plucky young lingerie saleswoman who becomes a bounty hunter after she loses her job. Hollywood turned one of the books into a movie last year. Katherine Heigl played the lead role. No, we didn't see it either. No one did.

Jayne Ann Krentz has written 50 New York Times best-sellers, and she has more pseudonyms than the employees of a strip club and the entire Wu-Tang Clan combined.

Sandra Brown has over 60 novels on the New York Times best-seller list. A staggering 80 million of her novels are in print worldwide in 33 languages. That's more than the Bible!

OK, it's not more than the Bible. Not even close. But still, 33 is a lot!

Nora Roberts blows the other three out of the water. She sold 12 million books in 2005 alone. Her novels have spent a combined 861 weeks on the NYT best-seller list as of 2011. If you head down to the local old folks' home and start stealing purses, you'll come away with wads of hard candy, a pound of unmailed letters to relatives and 45 Nora Roberts novels.

Oh. And they all look like the same damn person:

How? How does this happen? Surely four successful women scattered across the country don't all fly in to see the same hairstylist? Once you have more than 50 books on the NYT best-seller list, are you inducted into a cult that uses oversaturated red dye and spiky hair to identify fellow members?

And look, we get what they're all going for here. This is the same haircut that Jon and Kate Plus Eight maniac made famous.

But damn, that was popular like five years ago. Kate Gosselin doesn't even look like that anymore. These chicks all have enough cash and access to information to ensure that they didn't have to show up to the famous novelist party all wearing the same head. But, for some reason, that just didn't happen.

It's as if the entertainment industry is running a genetic breeding program that's designed to spit out successful novelists and they maybe haven't updated the software in a while so now it's all glitchy and spits out the same person every time.

We're guessing it was a similar program that gave us Zooey Deschanel and Katy Perry.