World Red Head Day

For most of history, red hair was explained by everything except its actual cause. That changed in 1995, when researchers reported that variants of a gene called MC1R were tied to red hair and fair skin, the first common visible human trait pinned to a specific gene.

The numbers were stark. The same study found the variants in more than four-fifths of red-haired or fair-skinned people, and in fewer than a fifth of those with brown or black hair. The gene sits on chromosome 16, and its red-hair forms are recessive, which is why the trait so often skips a generation and surprises a family.

Around the mid-2000s, the press began running a grim prediction: redheads would be extinct by the end of the century. The supposed warning traced back to a body called the Oxford Hair Foundation, which National Geographic later reported was a front funded by a hair-dye and cosmetics company, not an independent research institute.

A 2014 sequel blamed climate change and came from a commercial DNA-testing firm rather than from any peer-reviewed study. Geneticists have since said plainly that none of it holds: a recessive gene stays in the gene pool as long as carriers keep passing it on, and redheads are not going anywhere. The myth survives anyway, which is part of why a day to correct it earns its place.