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Hair Colour & Personality (Redheads: Fact & Fiction)

Caroline said:
as someone who started life blonde and whose hair has been going slowly darker, (i'll probably end up like my grandfather, black haired) how does this affect me?
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It makes you crazy like my husband, who looked like a Midwich Cuckoo as a child, was a blond bombsite (sorry, bombshell) when we met and is now just plain old brown.
And will he bleach it for me? Will he eckaslike. :rolleyes:
 
Caroline said:
as someone who started life blonde and whose hair has been going slowly darker, (i'll probably end up like my grandfather, black haired) how does this affect me?
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hmmmm, cunningly deceptive aye?:sceptic:
 
Caroline said:
as someone who started life blonde and whose hair has been going slowly darker,
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I did too, my hair was white when I was tiny then went an ashy/mousy colour then darker dull brown. I have no red in my hair at all,if I bleach it it goes pure white.This hair type is common in Britain (I read about it but can't remember too many details) called variable brown or blonde, I can't remember which (useless me :D ) but this is why on average men like blonde women and women go for dark men- the blondeness of women implies youth and health and the dark of men age and experience.
Me? I like red hair.
EDIT didn't get to the point after all that :D I don't think colour affects character, I've seen it demonstrated in small animals where a new colour can get a reputation for having certain character traits which are subsequently easily bred out.
 
Stormkhan said:
perhaps the stereotypes of hair colouring comes from old racial traits as seen in the Graeco-Roman worldview.

Red-haired people would, generally, come from the celtic tribal stocks and have a reputation for agressive, temperamental and emotional behaviour.
Blonds would harken back to the nordic races (note none of the Aryian bullshit) and people who endured, were strong and sensual but not intelligent or "civilised".
The mediterranean colouring (of dark hair and eyes and "olive" complexion) would be seen as "average".
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But there were plently of blond/e Romans. Just as there are blond/e Italians today. The darker coloring is and always has been more prevalent, but Pompey the Great (self-named, which gives me a giggle) and Julian Caesar were both blond. In fact, it was said to be a Julian family trait, a full head of blond hair. There were other notable blonde and red-headed Romans. Rufus was a common cognomen and that means "red" as in "red-haired". The dictator Sulla was red haired, and I believe Tiberius was also redheaded. Marcus Aurelius was also a blond I read somewhere.
 
I'm a red head of sorts. Not a total nadger but a nice deep red which gets nice blonde bits in the summer.

I'm stroppy, firey, insecure...stereotyped to a T! :eek:
 
IMO, blondes seem to be the ideal in Northern Europe/English speaking nations
but not necessarily in other areas. As a blonde I've always got a lot of attention. My best
friend of a few years ago was an attractive brunette but she failed every time to get attention
when her fairer mates were around.
Then one day we met a crowd of Afro-American sailors and every single one of
them was crazy for her and virtually ignored me. Later when I travelled France and met
people of all kinds of nationality, I found Mediterranean types by and large favoured
brunettes too and the only men who asked me out were blond or mousy Brits, Swedes,
Germans or Americans. Is it a tribal thing? Are we more likely to be attracted to people whose
genes wouldn't contrast ours too drastically? I note that most young children in Britain are
blonde or mousy. Do British men like blondes more because it reminds them of children?
I'm not suggesting a paedo element here, it's just that we are often told that men like women
who exhibit child-like features such as large eyes, clear skin etc.
Back to redheads - my redheaded grandmother was called Ena, which means "fiery". She was
the most placid creature in the world and everyone used to make jokes about how she broke
the stereotype. My grandfather had blond hair and blue eyes and was the real nutter. Mind you,
he had Scottish blood, which kind of explains it ;)
 
You may have a point about being attracted to similar genes. But I'm mediterranean in colouring and have never been attracted to swarthy looking men.

My father was Turkish and fell for my mother because she was a blonde (not natural being a red-head by birth). Of course my preferences could be because I am half-English and so I'm genetically attracted to English/North Europeon men.
 
When I was a kid I was blonde, now am very dark brown and according to my other half "swarthy", who incidentaly is blonde but likes dark haired men (lucky really for me), have nearly always had blonde girlfriends or wives! (only one at a time).In fact she calls me something that I could not say on here because of PC, I have picked up Arabs in my cab and (twice) they have asked if I come from Morroco or Tunisia, so how come I got so dark when I started blonde?.
 
I suppose it's like ones choice in music or tastes in food, why you are attracted to one hair colour over another cannot be explained. As a dark-haired woman it's still a pleasant shock when you find a man who likes dark-hair it somehow sets them apart from other men, makes them almost suave and sophisticated. It's a similiar shock when you find a song written about a brunette Roy Orbisons 'Mystery Girl' and I assume Van Morrisons 'Brown-eyed Girl'.

Not knocking blondes in the slightest, two of my dearest friends are blonde and completely defy the dizzy/dumb blonde stereotype. I simply think that the human eye is attracted by the bright and the light and you don't get much more colourful than blonde hair.
 
I was born a real redhead and was like that up til the age of about 5 when I went very dark brown within the space of a year. Stayed dark up until a few years ago (am 29 now) when I started going red again. I always wondered if personality affects hair color rather than the other way around - the inside showing on the outside, if you see what I mean - since I was very bubbly as a small kiddie then withdrawn for years from bad experiences in school and early work life. :confused:
 
Redheads - Fact and Fiction

I think redheads are pretty darn interesting - in fact, I wonder if in a human sense if they are the most unique humans on the planet. Has there been anything discovered from all the genetic DNA work that has thus been done?

Aren't orangatangs, the red-headed apes, the most removed geneticly from it's similar primate cousins? Is the same true of the human redhead?

And check out these claims at this redheaded support/fan site:

http://dougbarber.com/red/Fun_Facts/fun_facts.html

Some say the red gene we carry has been passed down from the Picts, original inhabitants of Scotland, & Ireland. Others feel it was folks like Eric the Red who did a marvelous job of spreading the wealth through out Europe and the Mediterranean.

Oxford researchers believe that ALL redheads inherited the gene from European Neanderthals. Based on rate of gene mutation, Oxford says the redhead gene appears to be much older than Cro-Magnon man in Europe. The accepted explanation is that the Celtic tribes had a strong remnant of Neanderthal blood caused by Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal interbreeding.
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And another site, Redheads United, is set in England and seems to be fighting anti-redheaded bias:

http://www.redheadsunited.com/

Redheads United is an organisation for redheads who feel that anti-redhead behaviour has gone on for far too long and should come to an end. We fail to accept that redhead taunts and jokes are something that we should have to live with, and we think that this kind of behaviour is no better than racism. We believe that redheads should be recognised as a minority group in the UK in the same way as ethnic and religious minorities.
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So what is fact and fiction concerning the redhead?

(For the record, I have black hair but quite a lot of red in my beard....)
 
I like red heads but when they have such sterling representatives as Chris Evans, Cilla Black and Sonja what defence is there?


From an evolutionary perspective though it's pretty interesting. Body hair is really only there for warmth (something I learnt from this very message board) any colouring is purely a result of the skins pigmentation or in some cases bleaching through exposure to high amounts of sunlight.

Perhaps there are genes within us that can produce naturally green and blue hair like the feathers of a parrot. Now that'd be cool.
 
Re: Redheads - Fact and Fiction

Mr. R.I.N.G. said:
I think redheads are pretty darn interesting - in fact, I wonder if in a human sense if they are the most unique humans on the planet. Has there been anything discovered from all the genetic DNA work that has thus been done?

Aren't orangatangs, the red-headed apes, the most removed geneticly from it's similar primate cousins? Is the same true of the human redhead?
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You are joking right?

Red (and blond) hair are largely linked with low melanin levels and are part of a range of adaptations for living in highert latitudes.

Again I'm unsure if that 'fun fact' is meant as serious but all Neadnerthal DNA tests show signifcant divergence from any group of modern humans. Equally red heads group genetically with other people they share an ancestry (so red heads of Irish descent group with people with dark hair).
 
Great thread. Not a red-head but have also always found them interesting. It's always seemed to me that they're wired differently to the rest of us(and not in a bad way). When I was very young it seemed to me that red-heads were actually blue, or sometimes green. Have no idea where the idea came from, although I still see red-heads as being blue or green inside. More of my nonsense; I think their blood is 'thinner' (meaning it seems to have more 'spaces' in it).

There does seem to be some resistance to red-heads. My mother (who's as politically incorrect as it's possible to be, but at 80 she's not going to change) positively cannot stand them and her aversion extends to 'red' cats. And my father, who has many red-heads in his family, said he missed being a red-head by the skin of his teeth and has always been extremely thankful for that.

Maybe in an attempt to make up for their rudeness, I always went out of my way to be especially nice to red-haired people, and it helped that I believed them to be more sensitive, more intelligent, more 'elevated'. The absolute love of my life was red-haired .. until he went bald, then white. I still find bearded, red-haired men to be sexy. But I think I had red-heads on a bit of a pedestal. As time went on, I discovered them to be pretty much the same as everyone else. God I write rubbish
 
Lol, Finehair.
My grandmother was a redhead, and I have dyed my hair in varying shades of red, quite often, (its naturally black). My sister however, prayed that none of her children would be ' little ginger-nuts ' . I once saw a girl, possibly about 4, with the most intense red hair, nothing ' carrotty ' about it, a vivid almost ruby-red, which astonished me.
I think they do stand out from the rest of us. Now you see more, since, like me, people reach for the latest ' red ' hair colour product. When I really ' went for it ' , I bleached my hair, then coloured it, so it was a dense, bright red, and I must say, I did feel a lot different, and more ' bouncy ' and alive, with a mop of scarlet hair. :D Didn't suit me, though, to be honest, my skin's too olive. :rolleyes:
 
I think I saw a report on PBS one time about the theory of orangatang's being human's closet relative.... here is an example:

Orangutan-mankind link revived in exhibit
[Cincinnati Post]

The idea that the orangutan is mankind's closest relative has never been popular in the scientific mainstream. In fact, when University of Pittsburgh anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz first advanced the idea 20 years ago, many colleagues rejected it out of hand, citing analyses that the genomes of chimpanzees and humans are almost 99 percent identical, while orangutans are genetically distinct.

But Schwartz's orangutan theory of human origins is not forgotten and last week got renewed attention at the Buffalo Museum of Science. As part of a developing exhibit on human origins, the New York museum unveiled a painting that depicted a fleshed-out version of Australopithecus afarensis. The 3.2 million-year-old fossil, popularly known as Lucy, may be the oldest common ancestor in the human family.

Unlike earlier reconstructions that favored chimp-like features, this version by the museum's scientific illustrator, William Parsons, looks more like an orangutan. "It shows," said John Grehan, the museum's director of science and collections, "that you can get more than one answer out of the same evidence."Neither the exhibit nor the painting is an endorsement of the orangutan theory, he emphasized, but they are meant to acquaint the public with competing theories of human origins, as well as provide some insights into the sociology of science.

"Every idea starts as a minority point of view," Grehan said, and sometimes ideas get overlooked or rejected because of scientific mindsets or assumptions. The orangutan theory, for instance, "isn't getting traction, but it's not necessarily the fault of the evidence."

Schwartz, a physical anthropologist who has been on the Pitt faculty for 30 years, based his theory on the morphological similarities -- the physical characteristics -- of humans and orangutans, not on their genes. The orangutan, a name that means "man of the forest," is an endangered species. About 4-1/2 feet tall, orangutans are shy, reddish-haired apes that live in the trees on the Indian Ocean islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

Schwartz counts more than three dozen features that are shared uniquely by orangutans and humans, from the ridges on the bottoms of their feet to the floor of their nasal passages.

The reconstruction unveiled last week was not based on Lucy, a partial skeleton missing a skull unearthed in Ethiopia by Donald Johanson in 1974. The new painting was based on a scan of another Australopithecus fossil, known as AL444-2, which was found at the same site as Lucy. Its skull is "very oranglike," Schwartz said, with front-facing cheekbones and a flat facial plane below the eye sockets. The brow ridges are thin, like those of orangs and humans, so they don't stick out like those of chimps and gorillas.

"Nobody is saying that Lucy is an orang," Schwartz said. Still, the similarities are intriguing, he maintained. Other anthropologists aren't necessarily any more intrigued with the orangutan theory now than they were in 1984, when Schwartz outlined it in a paper in the prestigious journal Nature, or in 1987, when his book on the subject, "The Red Ape: Orangutans and Human Origins," was published.

"I'm not aware that anyone has given Jeff's idea more thought since the initial discussion and I don't think that anything has happened in the intervening years that would lead to it being more likely to be reconsidered," Andrew Hill, chairman of anthropology at Yale University, said last week.

"There is absolutely no evidence to refute the well-established finding that humans and chimpanzees are most closely related," agreed Maryellen Ruvolo, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University.
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http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/2/2004/04/09/story105.html
 
Jeffrey Schwartz is a respected phsyical anthropologist but for such things to have an use in cladiistics then they have to be shown to be due to homology and not due to homoplasy (parallelism) or convergence. As they are so closely related they could easily be homoplasies possibly related to functional adaptations. It could also be that these features were derived from an ancestor but lost by chimps and gorillas.

Gneetic evidence completely blows this one out of the water. Interestingly the story you reproduce misses of the final paragraph so here are the last two:

"There is absolutely no evidence to refute the well-established finding that humans and chimpanzees are most closely related," agreed Maryellen Ruvolo, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University. "I was surprised to hear that Schwartz still believes that orangutans are most closely related to humans."

Orangutans, Ruvolo noted, are genetically very distinct from humans, chimps and gorillas. The strong genetic similarity between chimps and humans, she noted, was one of the main reasons why the federal government opted to spend millions to sequence the chimp genome. By comparing the chimp and human genomes, scientists hope to determine which genetic factors account for the physical and biomedical differences between the species.
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http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:.../shns/story.cfm?pk=ORANGUTANS-03-30-04&cat=AH
 
I was told by my genetics professor at uni that ginger hair is due to a genetic mutation that leads to a melanin deficency. this is why red heads also have fair skin and frequently freckles and burn easilly in the sun. this can also explane why you get darker red hair and those with more brighght orangey shades of red hair, because it's their genetic hair colour manifesting it self as best it can with the melanin deficentcy.
 
My maternal grandmother was a redhead, I have a few cousins on that side of the family who are redheads, my own hair is really a very very dark dark red. I find redheads (of the male variety!!) attractive ... too bad they see me as a right dog :(
 
LobeliaOverhill said:
My maternal grandmother was a redhead, I have a few cousins on that side of the family who are redheads, my own hair is really a very very dark dark red. I find redheads (of the male variety!!) attractive ... too bad they see me as a right dog :(
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A red setter perhaps?

(runs away)


[But I must admit I've always had a bit of a thing for redheads...]
 
My Irish grandmother was a red head. My father was a red head. My brother is a red head. I myself am blond (like my Swiss grandpa). I never heard anyone say anything derogatory about the 'gingahs' of the clan, and it meant I could spot them in a crowd. :D

Keyser "proud to have that particular genetic mutation lurking about, thank you very much" Soze.
 
Two of the most laid-back peeps I have ever known - my late beloved Gran and my younger son - could only be described as ginger. Both famously placid individuals, and carroty in the extreme. :) They never knew each other, more's the pity.
 
I'm blonde and have no direct relative with ginger hair.

However, for some damnable reason my facial hair grows a very dark shade of ginger - not strikingly orange, but certainly auburn.

I also have to admit to having a thing for red-heads. The first girl I ever had a crush on was a red-head. She wanted nothing to do with me mind you. I was eleven at the time :p

Red-heads seem to have drifted in and out of my life so far with an odd frequency - despite always aiming for dark hair in a woman. For some reason very few dark haired women seem to be interested though.
 
Jarmaniac said:
A red setter perhaps?
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<runs off into the far distance, ignoring all persons yelling her name at the tops of their voices>
 
Ginger cats have a reputation for being aggressive, don't they? I asked the internet about this but got sidetracked by a story about The Cats Martial Arts Assembly

Anyway, Redheads are lovely. Ginger blokes aren't. That was my five cents. Thank you and goodnight.
 
Just a little thing about the whole "red heads burn easily in the sun" thing. My mum has bright orange hair, and loads of freckles, but she doesn't have a problem with being burnt in the sun. Her skin is fair, but not the very pale that you usually associate with red heads. She doesn't need to use very high factor creams when she's abroad, she just tans. She goes quite a deep brown really.

I on the other hand have naturally light brown hair with red and blonde bits in it, although I dye it all sorts of red colours. I'm not as freckly as my Mum, more moley really, but my skin burns ridiculously easily. I actually have recurring nightmares about being out in the sun with no protection.

Quite frankly I feel cheated. I get the high maintenance skin without the cool hair colour.

And ginger blokes can be lovely. Paul Bettany- be my boyfriend!:D
 
And i have a relative with a little girl that has the most beautiful red hair and a dark complexion. She tans very easily in the sun. It is a most unusual combination and she is a gorgeous child.
 
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