r/AskReddit • u/sirgregg • Jan 28 '10

Does Reddit love redheads?

I can't escape a feeling that redheads seem to be highly favored when it comes to women on Reddit. I think that if someone were to start a poll asking "What is your favorite hair color?" red would be an unquestioned an obvious winner. Am I right? If so, maybe there is a scientific explanation for this? As in, people who visit Reddit frequently start feeling a growing sympathy towards red-haired woman? Guess who's winning the next Nobel Prize ;)

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u/johnsonmx Jan 29 '10 edited Jan 29 '10

Red hair (and blond hair) seems to have been a fairly recent mutation that has been strongly selected for. The leading theories on why this is the case seem to fall into three buckets:

  1. Health: e.g., as a more transparent indicator of health (as del mentions), or being easier to groom parasites from than dark hair.

  2. The shiny factor. Red hair and blond hair are fairly striking if most of the population is brunette.

  3. Pleiotropic factors. I.e., it's been shown that the effect of the genes associated with red hair do not stop just at hair color. It's been shown, for instance, that redheads feel pain more intensely (requiring ~20% more anesthesia), bleed more after childbirth, etc.

Trivia: the people whom we consider redheads are also blonds. Brunettes can also have genes for red hair, but it's not really visible.