Who started Redhead Appreciation Day?

What is documented is the observance rather than its founding, with United States television stations marking September 23 for their audiences in recent years. No creator, organization, proclamation or establishment record for the day has been located in any primary or independent source.

Is Redhead Appreciation Day the same as Redhead Days in the Netherlands?

No. Redhead Days is a Dutch festival held in Tilburg over the last weekend of August, and its 2025 edition drew participants from more than 80 countries.

Redhead Appreciation Day

Next celebratedWednesday, September 23, 2026

Only 15 percent of people who carry a pair of red-hair gene variants actually end up redheads; the gene named for the color mostly does not produce it.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

--DAYS

--HRS

--MIN

--SEC

Last updated August 19, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATESeptember 23

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYFun

SUBCATEGORYUnique

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

Marked by broadcasters, credited to no one.

No creator, founding organization, or establishment record for Redhead Appreciation Day has been located in any primary or independent source. What is documented is the observance itself, marked on the date by United States broadcasters.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday

INTRO

What two copies of the red hair gene actually produce

Geneticists can read the so-called red hair gene straight off a DNA sample. What they cannot reliably do is tell you what color the hair came out.

In the UK Biobank data, only 15 percent of people carrying a pair of MC1R variants turned out to be redheads. Light brown was almost three times more common in that group. The gene named for red hair mostly does not produce it.

Redhead Appreciation Day has no documented founder and no establishment record of any kind. The trait it marks has a far better paper trail than the day does.

It is also not National Love Your Red Hair Day, a separate United States observance on November 5 created by the founders of How to be a Redhead.

ORIGINS

Redhead Appreciation Day history

INTRODUCTION

In 1995 the question was simpler. Could one named gene account for red hair at all?

A team including Ian Jackson and Jonathan Rees went looking. Their sample would look almost quaint now: thirty British and Irish redheads, matched against thirty brunettes.

CHAPTER 01

Sixty people, one gene

More than 80 percent of the red-haired or fair-skinned group carried variations in a receptor gene called MC1R. Among the brown-haired group, about 20 percent did. The geneticist Richard Spritz called it "the first time in humans that a specific gene for any common visible characteristic has been identified".

What MC1R does is act as a switch. When the receptor works, pigment cells build dark eumelanin. When its signal drops, they build red pheomelanin instead.

CHAPTER 02

The same researchers, 343,234 people later

Twenty-three years on, Jackson and Rees were authors on a second paper about the same gene. This time the sample was 343,234 UK Biobank participants, all reporting a British background.

MC1R explained 73 percent of red hair's heritability. Eight further variants accounted for most of what was left. The pair who had found the gene had now mapped its limits.

CHAPTER 03

A day nobody signed

The day itself left nothing like that behind. No proclamation, resolution, trademark, or founding organization turns up for it in any primary record.

What does turn up is people keeping it. American television stations have marked September 23 for their audiences, among them WIS in South Carolina and KAKE in Kansas.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why Redhead Appreciation Day Matters

MEDICINE

Twenty volunteers said yes. 468 patients said no.

A 2004 study in Anesthesiology measured desflurane in ten red-haired and ten dark-haired women, and reported that the redheads needed more. A later cohort of 468 surgical patients found no such difference, and a 2024 review of ten studies called the evidence inconclusive.

BIOLOGY

The pigment may carry risk of its own

Mice carrying both the red hair and fair skin phenotype and BRafV600E, the most common melanoma oncogene, developed invasive melanoma with no ultraviolet exposure, in a 2012 study in Nature. Removing the animals' ability to make pheomelanin protected them, which points at the pigment itself rather than sunburn alone.

STIGMA

Sociologists asked redheads what they experience

A 1997 study in Symbolic Interaction found that redheads typically receive negative treatment as children, and report lowered self-esteem and a sense of being the center of attention. The same interviews found they typically come to appreciate the hair color and how it shaped their sense of self.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about Redhead Appreciation Day

The strongest signal is not inside the gene

In UK Biobank the top association with red hair was not a coding change at all. It sat some 97 kb of DNA away from the start of MC1R, outside the gene itself.

Penetrance runs from under 1% to over 90%

Which MC1R variant you carry matters as much as how many. Two of them produce red hair in fewer than one in a hundred of the people homozygous for them, while another produces it in more than nine in ten.

Some Neanderthals may have been red-haired

A 2007 paper in Science reported an MC1R variant called R307G in two Neanderthal individuals. It is not an allele found in living people, so today's redheads did not inherit it.

Redheads are not only Celtic or European

Morocco and Jamaica both have higher-than-average numbers. MC1R appears to dominate hair color strongly enough that its variants still produce red hair in dark-skinned populations.

A hair dye company helped launch the extinction scare

The Oxford Hair Foundation, since dissolved, predicted redheads would be extinct by 2100. Ian Jackson, who helped identify the gene, calls it a front funded by a hair dye and cosmetics company.

BY THE NUMBERS

Redhead Appreciation Day by the Numbers

15,731: UK Biobank participants with red hair
1-2%: Red hair, people of European origin
6-13%: Red hair, estimates for Wales, Scotland, Ireland
45: Median size, red hair pain studies

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe Redhead Appreciation Day

Learn how the trait is actually inherited

Red hair follows when both copies of the MC1R gene carry loss-of-function changes. The National Library of Medicine lays out that pigment switch in plain language.

CHECK

Check the extinction claim before repeating it

The prediction that redheads will die out keeps circulating with nothing behind it. National Geographic traced where the claim started and put it to working geneticists.

MENTION

Mention your hair color before a procedure

The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation advises natural redheads to tell their anesthesia provider or dentist ahead of surgery or dental work. Its patient guide is equally clear that the studies are mixed.

HEAR

Hear what redheads said about their own hair

The research here asked redheads directly rather than about them. The 1997 study is titled Ugly Duckling to Swan.

READ

Read the original research instead of a summary

The 2018 UK Biobank hair color analysis is open access, figures and all. Reading it directly shows how much of red hair the gene does and does not account for.

Test your knowledge