How Did You End Up With Red Hair?

multitude from dissimilar percentage of the world expect dissimilar , and sometimes it feel weird to call for why . But yes , there is in fact alchemy and genetics behind the way of life we look .

Take a redhead ’s freckled skin and scarlet pilus , for object lesson . These trait get along in the main from the way one gene control the production of melanin , the pigments behind pelt and hair color . A fresh video from the American Chemical Society ’s Reactions channel walk through how that work .

Melanin - producing cells , call melanocytes , create not one , but two classes of melanin — pheomelanins , which produces yellow and crimson hair and all the pinkish parts of your body like your lips and your genitals , and eumelanin , which produces the blue colours . Eumelanin also absorbs the ultraviolet visible radiation shoot the peel , turn over it into heat to protect the body ’s desoxyribonucleic acid from the rays ’ damaging result . That ’s why folks from regions with stronger sunlight tend to have benighted one-sided skin — they have more sunlight to parcel out with , and command a stronger melanin shield .

We even have some disconsolate melanin called neuromelanin in our brains — but that flavour is n’t made by your skin ’s melanocyte cells , and is n’t authoritative for skin or hair color . More likely it helps your brain avoid damage from sure chemicals , according toa paperpublished in the journal Progress in Neurobiology back in 2005 .

So , redheads have a version of a cistron called MC1R that causes melanocyte to create more of the pheomelanin , rather than the eumelanin — as a result , they have paler skin and the theme song red pilus . There ’s evena magazinefor redheads forebode MC1R. Huh .

If you remember high school biology , ruddy headedness is a recessive trait . At the most canonic degree , that means either both parent have to be redheaded to make a redheaded shaver , or both parents must have at least one copy of the redheaded trait in their pair of MC1R genes . Again , using the simplest model , the odds change based on how many redheaded genes there are . There ’s a 50 percent opportunity a kid will be redheaded if one parent has red hair and the other has a violent hairsbreadth recessive cistron . There ’s a 25 percent probability if neither parent has reddish hair but both have the recessive trait .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

The MC1R gene is n’t theonly oneresponsible for ruddy hair though , so the resulting write up and numbers are a niggling more complex in reality .

And as far as that whole redheads feel more pain thing , the video summons studies that says carrottop might need more anesthesia , and another says that redhead feel moreheat - inducedpain . Other subject say that redheadsfeel pain differently . Call us once you witness an experimentation that finds a effort .

Anyway , you are now armed with knowledge about redheads . Be dainty as you use said noesis .

William Duplessie