As posted in this thread, some believe there is a scarcity of natural redheads. Being as I am one, I’m sort of curious if you are a natural redhead or the parent of one.
Both of my grandfathers had red hair (in fact, my mom’s dad had two red haired brothers as well). None of their children had it, and there are only two redheads in my generation (of 22 grandchildren on my mother’s side). Neither of my kids have red hair; they both started out sort of strawberry but they’re now blonde.
I know there are a lot of dyed reds out there, but I’m interested to know if you’re a natural redhead; your ancestry, and link to a picture of yourself or the shade might be nice, as well.
My mom’s side, Icelandic; Dad’s is English and Irish. Here’s the family last December. My eyebrows are naturally blonde - those are dyed.
I’m one of them Judas-haired freaks. My hair is more of a mix, though. If you were to pluck my hairs individually, you’d find auburn, dirty blonde, red, light blonde, and (goddamned) gray.
I think it skips generations in my family, as well. I had great aunts/uncles with red hair, but my parents and brother have brown hair. None of my three kids have red hair.
My name is French, but in terms of ancestry, the vast majority were Scots-Irish or English.
According to Wiki only 2% of us in the US have red hair. Worldwide Scotland has the most natural redheads at 13%.
That said Vynce and I both have red hair, as does our mother. The only other person in the family who had red hair was her maternal grandmother. Mom is 1/2 Irish and 1/2 Portuguese, while Vynce and I are also French, English and Scottish.
As for shades - I don’t know about that great grandmother, but the three of us still living have coppery-red, mom’s always being the lightest. That makes sense, though, considering the relatively recent theory that red is co-dominant rather than recessive, which makes it “mix” with the other parent’s hair color; Dad’s hair is dark brown. Here’s an old, not terribly well scanned picture.(It’s pinker than the actual photo)
Like Ginger, both of my grandfathers had red hair. (I feel obligated to mention here that they are both still alive, but neither of them has much hair to speak of at all anymore.)
On Mom’s side, she had two redheaded siblings, who ended up auburn and strawberry blonde as they got older. In the third generation, there are three redheads (only one of them the child of a second-gen redhead) out of 13 grandchildren.
As for Dad’s side, let me directly quote my dear Grandma, who will tell the following to anyone who will listen, usually while holding a hank of my hair in a death grip: “I married a redheaded man, and I hoped my children would all have that beautiful red hair. I have four children, eleven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, and every time, I asked the same three questions–Is it a boy or a girl? Is he/she healthy? Does the baby have red hair?” I’m the only redhead, and Grandma keeps a very close eye on my hair. I dyed it black in college, and she was furious. To this day, she refuses to believe that my hair is natural, because it’s not the exact color it was the day I was born.
As a comparison for how my own hair has faded and mellowed over the years: Four years old. This summer. (And feel free to comment on how obviously tanked I am in that picture–Dad’s just barely holding me up. As an aside, the old couple on the left is one formerly-redheaded Grandpa and the Grandma who distrusts my hair.)
I forgot my heritage–Dad’s side is Lithuanian and Israeli for the most part. Mom’s is mostly Irish, Scottish, and German, but there’s a smattering of other stuff in there, too.
My father is American mutt but the name is welsh in origin and has god knows what kind of genes floating around; my mother is portuguese from the Azores. I was born with black hair which all fell out and after a couple years as bald as an egg it grew back red. That alien kid look, fish belly white with freckles and light brown, sort of amber colored eyes and red hair. This was especially striking as my sibs look, well, portuguese, varying shades of olive brown skin and dark brown to near black hair and eyes.
No ancestor in either side has red hair to anyone’s knowlege other than, by report, my father’s great aunt. However, my vovo’s mutterings about seeing what happens when you marry white guys quite aside, I assume there was a quiet co dominant hanging around in there somewhere, several of my aunts have what you would call warm brown hair which is not quite red enough to get called auburn.
As I got older, my hair darkened. For about a decade I have colored it back to the color I habitually think of myself as having, which is a light auburn color. I am now letting it grow out again, and I find it startling to look in the mirror as my hair is now quite brown.
Dearly Beloved is Dutch and ever so Dutch, hundreds of years of blond-on-blue and no redheads anywhere in that lineage.
We split up the genes neatly: I have one child with generations of dark haired, dark eyed portuguese farmers and sailors looking out of his face and one with generations of bright blond, blue eyed Dutch farmers and sailors looking out of his. My sisters refer to them as Night and Day.
I’m the only natural redhead in my family on both sides. (at my granddad’s funeral a couple of years ago, everyone recognized me, even cousins I hadn’t seen since I was a baby) My mom’s background is mostly English/Alabama Scots/Irish and my dad’s mom was born on the boat over from Ireland. I think his dad was of English descent and he evidently had a red beard (he was killed in Pearl Harbor so there aren’t any color photos of him around).
My hair was very bright when I was a kid but it’s mellowed some with age. It’s also got natural strawberry blod streaks 'cause I spend too much time in the sun. It’s kinda unusual in that it’s fine and stick straight; most redheads I know have curly, coarser hair.
I was born a redhead, and it’s now faded to strawberry blonde. My mom’s mom was a redhead, and all of her daughters have dark brown to black hair with red highlights. On my dad’s side, my great-grandmother had auburn hair, both of my dad’s sisters are strawberry blondes, and his brother is a true redhead, who married a strawberry blonde. Their kids have platinum blonde hair that never darkened. Ancestry is German/Welsh/Cherokee/general melting pot on my mom’s side and a Northern European Heinz 57 on my dad’s.
My daughter has red hair. It is an unusual shade of light red that I believe used to be called Titian; it’s not at all blonde, and it’s not something you see very often. (It gets even more reaction than bright redheads do, and I wish it didn’t.) Since her hair is also fluffy and wavy, she looks rather like a magazine illustration from 1900, which is a little disconcerting in real life.
Though I have only a bit of red in my brown hair, there are several redheads on my family tree, on my dad’s side. My husband’s family also has a few; his grandmother in particular had red hair as a girl.
My kids both have red hair. I was a blonde as a child and my husband has always had brown hair. My siblings have brown hair. His siblings have brown hair. All of our nieces and nephews have brown or blonde hair. Our parents have blonde or brown hair. Our grandparents…
You can see where I’m going with this. There are no cousins, even distant, or ancestors that anyone can remember with red hair. When our daughter was born, she was mostly bald. When little wisps of hair began to grow in I remember asking mom “Is that RED?!” Sure enough…
When she was little her hair was curly. People touched her hair all the time, everywhere we went. It was a beautiful, light-colored red.
I could always find her in a crowd of kids. School concert? No problem. School playground at lunchtime? Easy.
As she got older her hair straightened and got darker. Now she’s 17 and has colored it since she was 16. I wouldn’t let her do it before then. It’s just so beautiful. She always hated the teasing from other kids and the attention from adults. I hope when she’s out of school she’ll go back to her natural color. When she was a cheerleader the teasing was pretty obnoxious.
When we had out son, we thought “NAH - no way will we have another red-head.” He was a baldy too and soon grew his own crop of red hair. It was curly until he was about two. Oh my gosh, was he cute! People couldn’t keep their hands off his hair either, and wherever we went his curls were fluffed. One haircut at the age of 2 1/2 took care of those curls and it’s been straight ever since.
Our heritage is Polish, Irish, and who knows what else. We’re mutts.
Our son will be in a concert tomorrow. I’ll be able to find him easily.
I have dark reddish blonde head hair, but if I let the facial hair go, we’re talking total red. Real deep dark red, not the orange “red” that others have. Scary viking red. I’m Irish on my fathers side and German on my ma’s.
My hair has darkened a little over the years (along with some grey:mad: ) but mostly it’s bright red, almost orange. So orange, in fact, that when my wife is mad at me she calls me PUMPKIN HEAD! When I was a teenage I was a dead ringer for ARCHIE, including the dark eyebrows. Every hair on my body is bright red, EXCEPT my eyebrows which are very, very dark red with some black. My Dad had very black hair. Perhaps that explains it.
I come from pure German stock going back at least 150 years. My paternal Grandmother insisted there was some distant English blood in us, but that’s not been proved.
Other than 1 cousin on my Fathers side, there is no red hair whatsoever in my family. None of my 3 kids have red hair. Not even close.
My mother was the only red-headed kid out of seven. Her mother was Irish so there was probably a red-head in her family somewhere. My father had dark brown hair (when he had hair). We also have Scottish ancestry on my dad’s side so he may have had some hidden redhead genes as well. Out of a family of five kids the oldest had a dark auburn red, the three middle all had bright red and I was blonde. As I got older I would find actual red hairs hiding under the blonde (thicker wavier red hairs) Eventually I got more and more red, now I am usually referred to as a strawberry blonde and sometimes as a redhead. It probably depends on how much sun I get which makes my hair appear lighter. In pictures it always looks redder but I don’t have any pictures of myself to share. My eyebrows and … other body hair tends to lean to the red side. I prefer to think of myself as a natural reddish-head.
I am currently thinking of making a change and enhancing my red a bit but I don’t want to end up looking like Lucille Ball. Part of me also doesn’t want people to think I’m not a natural redhead since I had to enhance it artificially - I definitely don’t want to have to prove it to everyone I meet.
Actually, neither. I glow in the dark, but I had forgotten to put on any makeup that day so a friend photoshopped it a bit so I didn’t look like I was dead. It’s such a great picture I’d hate to frighten people with my pallor. See what ten minutes in the sun does to me (old picture)?
My mom has dark hair and my dad has “dirty blonde” hair. My younger sister, their third child is a natural red head. Two out of three of her kids have red hair, too.
My daughter also has red hair, although mine is brown (bleached blonde, actually.)
I always tease my daughter that I want to dye my hair red to match hers, but she’s not going for it. http://aura.zaadz.com/photos/5/43900/large/100_0500.jpg?
Irish, German, etc here. Natural almost auburn red hair. My mom has red hair but she dyes it blonde (it is harder to see the grey growing in that way apparently.) My aunt on the other side of the family and my cousin, her son, both have red hair but it is more of an orange red than mine.
