Louise Dinner Date Red Hair

Louise Dinner Date Red Hair
When she heard that a Newcastle councillor had recommended a family of ginger children dye their hair to avoid bullying, Louise Crowe decided enough was enough. Here, she reveals why the time is right for a redhead revolution
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We're all around you. If you look, you'll see us: on buses, in shops, at the office, in pubs; we are more common in Britain than anywhere in the world. Yet you'll rarely see us on beaches, and you'll be lucky to spot us in direct sunlight during the summer months. We are redheads. You might know us as ginger, or strawberry blond if you're being kind; few of us have passed through life untouched by carrot-top jokes or escaped the muffled laughter induced by our milk-white legs in PE lessons. A large number of us have been followed round playgrounds by gangs of mouse-haired children chanting: 'Tut-tut, ginger nut, where d'ya get your hair cut?' All of us have automatic entry into the only minority group for which discrimination based on skin and hair colour is socially acceptable.
I am the only redhead in my family, but we are all of a pale and freckled complexion and produce a different form of melanin (brown pigment) to that of the tanning population. Ours presents as dense, discrete patches called freckles, which my sister and I spent our teenage years trying to obliterate with Fade Out, the product claiming to rid us of such 'imperfections'. Over the years, I have learnt to love my freckles. As with all redheads, I have endured comments on creating never-ending dot-to-dots across my arms, and far-fetched predictions of the freckles joining together to create the perfect tan, although if you joined together the freckles from all four members of my immediate family, I doubt there would be enough to cover much more than a leg.
I hate the summer. For you, this is the time for short skirts, flip-flops and strapless tops, for becoming significantly more attractive over a few short weeks. For me, it means turning hot and pink, sitting in the shade and, if I forget to reapply my factor 50, getting burnt in my lunch hour. For redheads, our behaviour pattern over the summer months is governed by the sun, or more specifically, by avoiding it.
Growing up in Newcastle, I was one of the lucky ones: we had an ozone layer and the North Sea wind blowing in ginger-friendly weather. Holidays were in Aviemore, Keswick and Blackpool - destinations hardly famed for bikini weather. The best we could hope for was what my father called 'no-coats weather'. Some holidays were perfect for our complexions, such as the two weeks spent on Skye immersed in thick fog; even so, when the low cloud dispersed on the last day, we still reached for the factor 50.
Another holiday in Aviemore during the 1976 heatwave brought out the burrowing instinct in us - we huddled under the cover of a roller rink for most of our stay. A sunny spell in Keswick confined us to the cover of trees on Derwentwater; I braved a brief outing on a boat under the cover of a jumper.
Meanwhile, it was the Eighties, and my schoolfriends were jetting off to Majorca and Ibiza and coming back to school with mahogany skins, asking sarcastically: 'So, when are you going on holiday?' On the one occasion we did go abroad, to the Dordogne, on the first night we sat outside for dinner at 7pm; by the time I went to bed, my back was hot and red, and by morning, a blistering bubbling expanse.
There are many disadvantages to being a redhead. Having to tint otherwise transparent eyelashes, for one. Also we feel pain more acutely - there's a hormone linked to pain sensitivity, and redheads have higher amounts of it. A 2002 study showed we need more anaesthetic in operations. Yet, there's no denying we're special - less than 2 per cent of the global population, and according to some scientists, threatened with extinction. The cause of our redness is down to a single gene - the MC1R gene. It is mutations and variations of this gene that cause gingerness.
As with all of our genes, we have two copies, inheriting one from our father and one from our mother. If you have two copies of the ginger version, you will have red hair; if you only have one copy, you won't. One gene (dark hair) dominates over another (red hair). Jonathan Rees, professor of dermatology at Edinburgh University, who was the first scientist to isolate the ginger gene, likens it to height. 'It's not like mixing black and white to get grey,' he says, 'just as tall and short people don't mate and create everyone of average height - you still have tall and short people.' Red hair follows what geneticists call an autosomal recessive mode of inheritance.
My mother comforts me with the fact my own autosomal recessive inheritance will mean I'll age more slowly - redheads have no choice but to stay out of the sun. Although she is pale and freckly, she is not ginger, nor was my father - but they were both carriers of the red-hair gene. My maternal grandfather was auburn and he passed on a copy of the ginger gene to my mother; my father's carrier status became apparent when he tried to grow a beard (it vanished soon after). Each of my parents carried one recessive ginger gene - present on their DNA but biding its time. When half of my mother's DNA fused with half of my father's DNA to create mine, I inherited the ginger genes from both; when the midwife handed me to my parents, my mother looked at my father in shock. 'She's ginger!' she said.
The same MC1R gene responsible for red hair in humans crops up in other red creatures, too. Our distant cousins include red setters, Highland cattle and red squirrels. It is estimated that the versions of the MC1R gene that cause red hair have been around for 20,000 to 40,000 years. What's less clear is whether we'll still be around for the next 20,000 to 40,000 years. Scientists at the Oxford Hair Foundation claim that natural redheads will disappear by 2100. Since it is just 2 per cent of us who are redheads, and less than 4 per cent who are carriers, and because the gene for red hair is recessive, they claim the number of redheads will gradually decrease and then disappear altogether as carriers mate with people who do not have the gene.
It's time for action - perhaps a government campaign showing us in a more positive light, or a dating website exclusive to redheads where we can make contact in a safe environment, free from dominant dark-hair genes. Our scarcity means we are less likely to meet, but I have managed two ginger relationships, though one was with a bald man - it wasn't until the third date that I focused on his eyebrows over dinner. 'Are you ginger?' I asked before receiving the good news.
'Of course I bloody am,' he said, as if I was blind rather than him bald.
At present, it's Scotland that has the highest proportion of redheads in the world: 13 per cent have red hair and an impressive 40 per cent carry the recessive ginger gene. Ireland comes second, with 10 per cent having red hair, and 35 per cent with the gene. In Wales, it's also 10 per cent, and in England frequencies are highest in Cornwall and the far north: we're united by our Celtic past. Or at least its climate - redheads flourished in less sunny conditions while others succumbed to rickets (the rest of you need more sunshine than us to generate vitamin D).
The Oxford scientists claim that as people relocate to less redheaded zones, the gene could become diluted and eventually vanish. Not so, says Steve Jones, professor of genetics at UCL. He agrees that while it's true that numbers may decline for a term, in the end redheads are more resilient than that. 'The gene,' he says, 'will come out later down the line.' And although we're more mobile than we used to be, the genes will still exist regardless of where the people go. It only takes two carriers to find each other attractive for there to be a chance of a new redhead being born.
If there were a decline in number, though, it'd be nice to think our rarity value might up our cachet, increase our desirability in terms of sexual partners. Nice, but not likely to happen any time soon, according to Professor Jones: 'That takes things into the realms of what I call bullshit science. You can't say if rarity increases attraction with humans.'
We have been fashionable before. In the age of Elizabeth I, for example, and we could do no wrong as far as the Pre-Raphaelites were concerned. These days, though, it's a tougher sell, in spite of redhead heroes such as Damian Lewis and Julianne Moore. The standard response is more likely to be similar to that of the Newcastle council official who reportedly suggested last month that the ginger children who'd been bullied so much their family had been forced to move house twice should dye their hair 'to take the pressure off'.
We're also too scarce for existing members to hide under full-head tints, but it's happening. A redhead waitress in Plymouth dyed her hair blond to escape ginger-phobic taunts; last month she received £18,000 for ginger harassment. 'You expect that from kids, but not when you're in your forties,' she said.
But we have more to worry about than popularity. Try the threat of natural selection. There's a biological disadvantage that's a part of the ginger parcel: a higher risk of skin cancer. Redheads carry four times the normal risk for skin cancer. Our evolutionary perk - our vitamin D-producing abilities - has been reeled in now that Western diets have improved; and our pale skin has become a biological handicap rather than a genetic boost.
Beyond dispute is that skin-cancer rates in Europe are on the rise. People are living longer (skin cancers are more common in the elderly) and we have more exposure to UV, although, according to Professor Rees, 'There has been no real increase in UV in the UK. What's happening is that behaviour has changed over the past 30 years. People are dressing differently; they expose more skin. They go abroad more often.' And this is in Europe: antipodean redheads have it much worse. In some regions of Australia and New Zealand, skin cancer occurs at 10 to 20 times the UK rate.
I have a redheaded friend, Jane, from New Zealand, who has redheaded parents, a redheaded aunt and two redheaded brothers. She tells me that in her town, Wednesday is skin-cancer day, and they all go down to the local clinic to have their skin checked and cancers burnt off with liquid nitrogen. It's a routine procedure done by the nurse. It is, fortunately, the less dangerous form of skin cancer - basal cell carcinoma, rather than melanoma. But still. Her father has a chunk out of an ear and his nose; her aunt, who has worn skirts all of her life, has chunks out of her legs.
It's not necessarily an easy life, being red-headed, but I wouldn't have it any other way. We deserve some respect for our highly developed strategies for sun avoidance, for the tenacity of the recessive ginger gene and for sidestepping natural selection. Yet instead we are subject to ridicule and prejudice. On holiday, some wag will always compliment us on our tans. And although I haven't had a man from the council drop by to suggest a Clairol rinse, I'm 37, and two weeks ago, when I was crossing a road, a group of three teenage boys began to circle me on their bikes, chanting: 'Ginger! Ginger! Ginger!' I comforted myself with the fact that they could all of them be, unwittingly, carriers of the ginger gene. I wished a carrier wife and an entire brood of ginger children upon them.
Is it any wonder we have a reputation for hotheadedness? Harassed by strangers, mocked by mouse-haired kids half our size - of course we're going to blow from time to time. We do, however, have a camaraderie that exists among redheads everywhere - a bond of shared experience and mutual admiration. I once bumped into Chris Evans in a pub and thanked him for the positive input he has had on redheads; he patted me on the shoulder in what I think was a common understanding (although maybe it was the drink).
My sister called me Ginge when we were growing up, but I bear no grudge. I would have done the same had I been born with her brown hair, and I gave back as good as I got. Twenty years on, though, there's been an unexpected twist. Her husband is ginger. I was outraged at her duplicity, of course, the years of taunts... but more than that, I was delighted: the ginger gene was about to receive one enormous boost in our family gene pool. My sister was in all likelihood a carrier, and she was to mate with a fully fledged, 100 per cent homozygous ginger. When she fell pregnant a few years later, the anticipation was unbearable, but I was not disappointed. Millie came with a thatch of bright-red hair on the day she was born. The ancient red-hair gene - invincible, and quite possibly lurking deep inside you ...
· The ultimate ginger champion, Chris Evans is so proud of his titian locks that he even named his media company after them - Ginger Productions.
· 2004 Model of the Year Lily Cole's 'red hair and porcelain skin makes her perfect for the ultra-feminine designs of the moment,' says a Harper's Bazaar editor.
· Mick Hucknall is tireless in his quest for ginger justice. It started young. At 14 he was told: 'You can't be the lead singer of the band, you've got ginger hair'.
· When Rupert Grint heard about the Harry Potter auditions he knew he had a chance. 'I'm a redhead like Ron Weasley - and we're both scared of spiders'.
· Charles Kennedy has taken ginger all the way to the Houses of Parliament. He describes himself as 'a proud member of the ginger minority'.
· At the height of her fame, Gillian Anderson was voted the World's Sexiest Woman by FHM. Proof, if any were needed, that ginger can mean gorgeous.
· Nicole Kidman hasn't always been happy with the looks that got her noticed. 'What with my height and hair - weird, curly, messy - I was considered a bit odd'.
· Geri Haliwell loved the colour so much she named herself after it. Now, though, Ginger Spice has plumped for the strawberry-blond end of the spectrum.
· 'I hate my freckles, I hate my red hair and I think I'm overweight when I see myself on screen,' says Lindsay Lohan. Don't fight it, Lilo - ginger's the new black.

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