Red Hair Trivia
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55 free Red Hair trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This red hair trivia quiz is for anyone who has ever been called ginger, carrot top or Bluey, and for everyone who wonders why. It starts with the science: the recessive gene on chromosome 16, the reddish pigment that does the colouring, why redheads freckle and burn, why two dark-haired parents can have a red-haired child, and the strange finding that redheads respond differently to anaesthetics and painkillers. Then it travels: to Scotland, which has the highest share of redheads on Earth, to the Volga region and the Udmurts once called the most red-headed people in the world, to the Tarim mummies of China, and to the Dutch town whose Redhead Day draws thousands from more than 80 countries. It covers the cultural baggage too, from Judas and Shylock in red wigs to the Elizabethan fashion for red, the painters who loved it, Sherlock Holmes's Red-Headed League, Anne Shirley's temper, and the 2007 hoax that claimed redheads were about to go extinct. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on red hair and the Redhead Day festival, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty-one questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 55 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The pale skin that usually comes with red hair helps the body get enough of which nutrient?
Vitamin D
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.
Q 02Erik the Red, the Viking probably named for his red hair, founded the first Norse settlement on which island?
Greenland
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.
Q 03Which pigment gives red hair its colour?
Pheomelanin
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.
Q 04What type of inheritance lets two dark-haired parents have a red-haired child?
Autosomal recessive
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.
Q 05Which Holy Roman Emperor did Italians nickname Barbarossa, meaning 'red beard'?
Frederick I
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.
Q 06Which country is often said to have the world's highest share of redheads, about 13% by one estimate?
Scotland
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.
Q 07A DNA survey of Britain and Ireland found red-hair gene carriers most concentrated around which city?
Edinburgh
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%.
Q 08Which Baroque composer, ordained as a priest, was nicknamed 'il Prete Rosso' for his red hair?
Antonio Vivaldi
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.
Q 09Which civil rights leader was nicknamed 'Detroit Red' as a young hustler because of his reddish hair?
Malcolm X
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.
Q 10The red-haired Tarim mummies were found in desert graves along the Silk Road in which country?
China
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.
Q 11Which red-haired storybook heroine is strong enough to lift her own horse with one hand?
Pippi Longstocking
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.
Q 12Which future king of Israel does the Hebrew Bible call 'admoni', or ruddy, the word it also uses for Esau?
David
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.
Q 13Which Norse god is usually described as having a reddish beard?
Thor
Q 21A 2007 DNA study suggested that some members of which extinct human group had red hair?
Neanderthals
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.
Q 22Which Harry Potter actor played an Ed Sheeran lookalike in the singer's 'Lego House' video, a joke on their resemblance?
Rupert Grint
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.
Q 23A 2007 report that redheads would soon die out was traced to a foundation funded by whom?
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.
Q 14In ancient Egypt, red hair was linked to which god of deserts, storms and disorder?
Set
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.
Q 15Which painter, too poor to pay sitters, recorded his own red hair in dozens of self-portraits?
Vincent van Gogh
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.
Q 16Why do most redheads burn rather than tan in strong sun?
Their skin makes little dark melanin
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.
Q 17Which pharaoh, whose mummy was flown to Paris for treatment in 1976, turned out to have been a natural redhead?
Ramesses II
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.
Q 18Researchers have found that people with red hair need more of what?
Anaesthetic
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.
Q 19The receptor that is faulty in most redheads normally responds to which hormone?
Melanocyte-stimulating 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.
Q 20Red-haired model Elizabeth Siddal fell ill after posing in a bath of water for which Pre-Raphaelite painting?
Ophelia
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 hair-dye maker
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.
Q 24Severe protein deficiency can turn dark hair red as part of which syndrome?
Kwashiorkor
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.
Q 25Which red-haired English queen is the subject of the Armada Portrait, painted around 1588?
Elizabeth I
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.
Q 26The hair colour 'Titian' is named after a painter from which city?
Venice
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.
Q 27In the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Red-Headed League', what is red-haired Jabez Wilson paid to copy out by hand?
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
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.
Q 28Which star first showed off her famous dyed red hair in the 1943 Technicolor musical Du Barry Was a Lady?
Lucille Ball
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.
Q 29In Anne of Green Gables, what is said to match Anne Shirley's hair?
Her temper
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.
Q 30Which Shakespeare character was traditionally played in a red wig?
Shylock
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.