55 Fun Facts About Red Hair

The pale skin that usually comes with red hair helps the body get enough of which nutrient?

Vitamin D: skin makes it from sunlight, and pale skin needs less sun to make enough, which may be why red hair, rare worldwide, is commonest on Europe's cloudy north-western fringe.

Erik the Red, the Viking probably named for his red hair, founded the first Norse settlement on which island?

Greenland: banished from Iceland after a string of killings, Erik spent his exile exploring the island, then gave it an inviting name in the hope that settlers would follow him there.

Which pigment gives red hair its colour?

Pheomelanin: in most people a receptor on the pigment cells switches production over to dark eumelanin, but in redheads that switch fails, so the reddish pigment builds up instead.

What type of inheritance lets two dark-haired parents have a red-haired child?

Autosomal recessive: each parent can silently carry one copy of the variant, so red hair can skip generations and then resurface, which is why forecasts that redheads will die out are wrong.

Which Holy Roman Emperor did Italians nickname Barbarossa, meaning 'red beard'?

Frederick I: the red-bearded German emperor set out on the Third Crusade but drowned in a river in Anatolia before reaching the Holy Land, and most of his army gave up and went home.

Which country is often said to have the world's highest share of redheads, about 13% by one estimate?

Scotland: the much-quoted figure is 13%, ahead of Ireland's 10%, but a dermatologist who helped find the red-hair gene says nobody has census-grade data and Ireland's true share may be even higher.

A DNA survey of Britain and Ireland found red-hair gene carriers most concentrated around which city?

Edinburgh: about 40% of people in its corner of the country carry a red-hair variant. Researchers had expected the rate to rise towards the north, yet the far north-west turned out to have the lowest, 29%.

Which Baroque composer, ordained as a priest, was nicknamed 'il Prete Rosso' for his red hair?

Antonio Vivaldi: ordained in 1703, 'the Red Priest' gave up saying Mass soon afterwards, blaming his poor health, and made his name as a violinist and composer instead.

Which civil rights leader was nicknamed 'Detroit Red' as a young hustler because of his reddish hair?

Malcolm X: a fellow dishwasher at a Harlem restaurant had the same reddish hair and was dubbed 'Chicago Red'. That friend, John Sanford, later became famous as the comedian Redd Foxx.

The red-haired Tarim mummies were found in desert graves along the Silk Road in which country?

China: the dry, salty soil of the Tarim Basin preserved the bodies without embalming, and a 2021 DNA study found they were a long-isolated local people, not migrants from the west as once supposed.

Which red-haired storybook heroine is strong enough to lift her own horse with one hand?

Pippi Longstocking: Astrid Lindgren's daughter Karin invented the name while off school ill and asked for a story, and Lindgren later wrote the tales down as a present for Karin's tenth birthday.

Which future king of Israel does the Hebrew Bible call 'admoni', or ruddy, the word it also uses for Esau?

David: the prophet Samuel had already passed over seven older brothers when Jesse sent for his youngest, a ruddy boy out tending the sheep, and Samuel anointed him on the spot.

Which Norse god is usually described as having a reddish beard?

Thor: Marvel's clean-shaven blond is the odd one out. The Icelandic sagas give the thunder god a red beard and even use 'Redbeard' as a nickname for him, though the older Edda poems never mention its colour.

In ancient Egypt, red hair was linked to which god of deserts, storms and disorder?

Set: Egyptians called the barren desert the Red Land and the fertile Nile soil the Black Land. Set was lord of the first, a god tied to the colour red who murdered his brother Osiris.

Which painter, too poor to pay sitters, recorded his own red hair in dozens of self-portraits?

Vincent van Gogh: he painted more than twenty of them during two hard-up years in Paris, sometimes on the back of an earlier picture so that he saved the cost of a fresh canvas as well.

Why do most redheads burn rather than tan in strong sun?

Their skin makes little dark melanin: the gene variant that reddens the hair also leaves skin short of the dark pigment that soaks up ultraviolet light, which raises the risk of skin cancer.

Which pharaoh, whose mummy was flown to Paris for treatment in 1976, turned out to have been a natural redhead?

Ramesses II: his mummy was met at the airport with the full military honours due to a king, and French scientists who studied the hair roots concluded that the red had once been his natural colour.

Researchers have found that people with red hair need more of what?

Anaesthetic: in a 2004 study red-haired women needed 19% more anaesthetic gas than dark-haired women, an effect traced to the gene variant behind their hair colour, though a later study found no difference in recovery.

The receptor that is faulty in most redheads normally responds to which hormone?

Melanocyte-stimulating hormone normally tells pigment cells to switch to making dark pigment; with a faulty receptor, the cells go on making the reddish pigment instead.

Red-haired model Elizabeth Siddal fell ill after posing in a bath of water for which Pre-Raphaelite painting?

Ophelia: John Everett Millais warmed the tub with oil lamps but was so absorbed in painting that he let them go out, and Siddal's father sent him a demand for fifty pounds in doctor's bills.

A 2007 DNA study suggested that some members of which extinct human group had red hair?

Neanderthals: two fossils carried a pigment-gene variant unknown in living people that should have given red hair, so the trait arose in them separately, though later genome studies suggest it was rare.

Which Harry Potter actor played an Ed Sheeran lookalike in the singer's 'Lego House' video, a joke on their resemblance?

Rupert Grint: for most of the video he seems to be playing the singer, until he walks on stage, security tackles him, and he turns out to be an obsessed fan stalking the real Sheeran.

A 2007 report that redheads would soon die out was traced to a foundation funded by whom?

A hair-dye maker: news stories called the 'Oxford Hair Foundation' an independent institute, but it was funded by Procter & Gamble, whose beauty brands included red hair dye.

Severe protein deficiency can turn dark hair red as part of which syndrome?

Kwashiorkor: the word comes from the Ga language of Ghana and means the sickness a child gets when the next baby arrives, because it is weaned off protein-rich breast milk.

Which red-haired English queen is the subject of the Armada Portrait, painted around 1588?

Elizabeth I: smallpox in 1562 scarred her skin and left her half bald, so in later life the famous red hair was a wig and the white face a thick layer of make-up.

The hair colour 'Titian' is named after a painter from which city?

Venice: Titian, the leading painter of the Venetian school, gave so many of his women red-gold hair that his name became the word for the shade, while a paler version is still called Venetian blonde.

In the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Red-Headed League', what is red-haired Jabez Wilson paid to copy out by hand?

The Encyclopaedia Britannica: the pointless job kept the pawnbroker away from his shop for four hours a day while his new assistant dug a tunnel from its cellar towards a nearby bank vault.

Which star first showed off her famous dyed red hair in the 1943 Technicolor musical Du Barry Was a Lady?

Lucille Ball: born with chestnut hair and blonde for her early films, she went red at MGM's urging so that she would stand out in Technicolor, and she kept the colour for the rest of her career.

In Anne of Green Gables, what is said to match Anne Shirley's hair?

Her temper: Mrs. Lynde says so after Anne flares up at her, and Anne soon proves the point at school by breaking her slate over Gilbert Blythe's head when he teases her about her hair.

Which Shakespeare character was traditionally played in a red wig?

Shylock: the red wig belonged to a comic-villain tradition that Edmund Kean broke with when he made his name in the part at Drury Lane in 1814.

Which biblical figure was commonly depicted with red hair in medieval European art?

Judas Iscariot: the image was so familiar that in Shakespeare's As You Like It a suspect lover's hair is called 'the dissembling colour', and a friend replies that it is 'something browner than Judas's'.

The occult writer Montague Summers declared that people with red hair 'of a certain peculiar shade' are unmistakably what?

Vampires: Summers, an English clergyman who professed to believe in them, wrote the line in a 1928 study and tied it to an ancient report of red-haired men being sacrificed at the grave of Osiris.

Who wrote that red-haired people 'of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous'?

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver says it of the Yahoos, the filthy man-shaped brutes of his last voyage, so the solemn 'observation' is a joke at the expense of a prejudice Swift's readers already held.

Which word for reddish-brown hair first meant 'whitish', from the Latin for off-white?

Auburn: it comes from the Latin alburnus and meant flaxen-fair until the 1500s, when its likeness to the word 'brown' pulled both the spelling and the meaning over to reddish-brown.

What does the Irish-derived name Rory mean?

Red-haired king: Rory anglicises the Gaelic Ruaidhrí, from words for 'red' and 'king', and a real king carried it, the last High King of Ireland, who ended up paying tribute to England's Henry II after the Anglo-Norman invasion.

In Australian slang, redheads are traditionally nicknamed what?

Blue or Bluey: the back-to-front nickname stuck so well that when Virgin launched an Australian airline with bright red planes in 2000, a public naming contest christened it Virgin Blue.

The Australian slang term 'ranga' for a redhead derives from which animal?

Orangutan: 'ranga' clips the name of the red-haired ape, which itself comes from Malay words meaning 'person of the forest', so the root of the taunt is simply the word for a person.

The Hokkien term 'ang mo', literally red-haired, is used in Singapore to describe whom?

All white people: Hokkien speakers coined the name for the Dutch and Portuguese traders they met four centuries ago, and a fort the Dutch rebuilt in Taiwan is still known as the Red-hair Fort.

Which British politician was called a 'ginger rodent' by Harriet Harman in 2010?

Danny Alexander: the Treasury minister answered that he was proud to be ginger and that rodents do valuable work cleaning up the mess others leave behind, and Harman rang him to apologise.

Which Peanuts regular pines for the Little Red-Haired Girl, who never shows her face in the comic strip?

Charlie Brown: Charles Schulz drew the heartache from life, basing the girl on a former girlfriend who had turned down his proposal of marriage.

Which supermarket withdrew a Christmas card joking that Santa loves all kids, 'even ginger ones'?

Tesco: a York mother whose three daughters are redheads complained that the 2009 card mocked them, and the chain said sorry and took it off the shelves there.

Which show tackled prejudice against redheads in its 'Ginger Kids' episode?

South Park: in the 2005 episode Cartman preaches that 'gingers' have no souls. It is said to have inspired a 2008 Facebook 'Kick a Ginger Day' that led to attacks on red-haired pupils and a police inquiry.

Which comedian played Sandra Kemp, who seeks refuge in a shelter for ginger people?

Catherine Tate: a redhead herself, she played Sandra in a running sketch on her own BBC show, and guest stars including Patsy Palmer later joined her as the campaigners of 'Gingers for Justice'.

Redhead Day, long held in the city of Breda, is a festival in which country?

Netherlands: it began by accident in 2005, when ten times more redheads than expected answered one man's newspaper advert and the many he had to turn away asked for a gathering of their own.

Which wizarding family in the Harry Potter books is known for its flaming red hair?

The Weasleys: Ron, the second youngest of seven red-haired children, gets everything second-hand, from his robes to his pet rat, which turns out to be a wizard in hiding.

What was Bart Rouwenhorst trying to do when he accidentally founded the Redhead Day festival?

Find 15 red-haired models to paint: the engineer and hobby artist advertised for them and 150 replied, so he photographed them all together, and the disappointed extras talked him into making it yearly.

Wendy's logo of a girl in red braids shows the daughter of which fast-food founder?

Dave Thomas: he named his first restaurant after eight-year-old Melinda Lou, known as Wendy, and later wrote that he regretted it because the fame had cost her some of her privacy.

Which country star, long known for his red braids, released the sparse 1975 album Red Headed Stranger?

Willie Nelson: his label's executives took the bare recording for a demo, but his contract gave him creative control, so it came out untouched and became the blockbuster that made him a star.

A rare inherited condition seen in Africa and New Guinea gives red hair and reddish-brown skin; it is a form of what?

Albinism: this 'rufous' type leaves reddish-brown skin and ginger or red hair, and it tends to harm the eyesight less than the white-haired forms most people picture.

Which Winter Olympic champion was nicknamed 'the Flying Tomato' for his mop of red hair?

Shaun White: the snowboarder, a three-time halfpipe gold medallist, grew tired of the name, and in 2010 he told a reporter that it was dead and he was now 'Animal', after the Muppets' drummer.

In The Catcher in the Rye, which red-haired relative does Holden say never got angry despite the stereotype?

His brother Allie: he died of leukaemia as a boy, and Holden writes a school essay about the left-handed baseball mitt that Allie had covered with poems in green ink.

Israel's first redhead convention, in 2014, was held at Kibbutz Gezer, whose Hebrew name means what?

Carrot: the gathering came two days after that summer's war ended, with numbers still capped for fear of rocket fire, and one headline called it a red alert that, for once, Israelis welcomed.

Which ancient king, whose Greek name means 'red-haired', gave his name to a victory won at ruinous cost?

Pyrrhus: after routing a Roman army at Asculum in 279 BC with crippling losses of his own, he is said to have remarked that one more such victory would finish him.

Peter Baker, nicknamed 'Ginger' for his flaming red hair, drummed for which 1960s rock supergroup?

Cream: Baker had already fired bassist Jack Bruce from an earlier band, but Eric Clapton would only join the new trio if Bruce came too, so the two enemies ended up as its rhythm section.

Simply Red took its name from the nickname of which red-haired lead singer?

Mick Hucknall: friends called him Red because of his hair, and he meant to give the band that one-word name until he decided it sounded wrong on its own and added 'Simply'.