Why are there so few people with red hair?

Outside the Body

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by Kate Simmons >> more about the author

Do you have a friend with red hair? Perhaps you are a redhead yourself! You may have noticed that more people seem to have blonde or brown or black hair than red hair. Maybe you’ve even noticed a friend who has red hair, but whose parents and siblings do not!

Red hair is caused by a pigment in hair called pheomelanin. Hair also contains a pigment called eumelanin, which helps to create brown and black shades of hair. Most people have more eumelanin in their hair than pheomelanin, but not so for redheads! They have enough pheomelanin to turn their hair a reddish color!

What determines how much eumelanin vs. pheomelanin is in your hair? It all comes down to genes. No, not the kind we wear! The kind inside of our body’s cells. Each cell in our body contains thousands and thousands of genes, which carry information that determines your qualities, such as height, eye color, and hair color.

Redheads inherit the gene for red hair from BOTH parents. Even if parents don’t have red hair themselves, they can still carry and pass on the gene. But the gene for red hair is recessive, meaning it is overpowered by other genes (such as the gene for brown hair), resulting in fewer redheads than people with blonde, black, and brown hair. In fact, less than 5% of people in the world are born with red hair!

It may seem strange that a mom with red hair may have a brown-haired child, while two blonde parents may have a redheaded child! But even if parents don’t have red hair themselves, as long as they are both carriers of the redhead gene, their child has a 1 in 4 chance of having red hair!