Beautiful hair represents your style, taste, and femininity. Hair in different areas has different characteristics. While most people have original traditional black hair, a few have exceptionally rare natural colors.
What is the rarest hair color? Ivirgo Hair Factory will answer your questions in the detailed article below. Let’s check it out now!
What Makes Hair Have Color?
People in different parts of the world will have considerable differences in skin color, hair color, and eye color. Before learning about rare colors, let’s go back to Biology to understand why hair has such a diverse color.
The mechanism of skin color, eye color, and hair color is quite similar due to the synthesis of pigments on the body. Two different pigments make up the human hair color, including Eumelanin and Pheomelanin.
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Eumelanin: Black pigment for hair density increase
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Pheomelanin: Yellow and red pigment
The concentration of these two pigments will determine your hair color. If your body makes more Eumelanin, your hair will be darker.
Conversely, when the concentration of Eumelanin decreases, Pheomelanin will evaluate your hair color.
What Is The Rarest Hair Color In The World?
Some natural hair colors are less common than others. In particular, the rarest hair colors are red, blonde, gray, brown, or white hair.
Red Hair
Red hair is the least owned hair color on Earth. According to population surveys, only about 1% to 2% of people have red hair. It is exciting that redheads are less responsive to anesthetics and more sensitive to pain than other hair colors.
Most people with red hair have European ancestry and live in northern and western Europe. And the countries with the largest redheads are the US, Scotland, and Ireland.
Only when both parents have the gene for red hair will their children have this unique genetic trait. Their hair can be dark burgundy, auburn, orange-red, light bronze, burnt orange, or strawberry blond.
Blonde Hair
Behind red hair, blonde hair is also a rare color. Only about 3% of the world’s population owns this natural hair color.
Blonde hair can exist in many different shades. Some people have hair with warm tones like sandy blonde, honey, strawberry blond, or caramel. Meanwhile, others have hair in calm tones, varying from pale platinum to ash blonde.
People with blonde hair often have Nordic ancestry. It is why Western countries have more people with blonde hair than other regions.
Brown Hair
Roughly 11% of the world’s population has brown hair. The hair fluctuates in color tones from light brown, maple brown, and milk chocolate brown to darker colors.
People with dark brown hair will belong to colors such as walnut brown or dark chestnut brown, dark brown, and most bottomless brunettes.
Brown-haired people are often concentrated in European countries. Here, people often believe that brunettes are more serious, mature, mature, and stable than their peers. Brown-haired girls also usually bring a much more independent and mature feeling.
An exciting thing about brown-haired people is that they are more likely to be affected by tobacco than other hair colors. That’s because their liver’s ability to metabolize nicotine is weaker than that of others.
Gray Hair
About 4% of the world’s population has gray hair. This hair color comes from age or some disease due to the breakdown of melanin. The majority with gray hair will be over 50, but some people start to go gray after age 20.
Silver hair color will have tones from gray, silver gray, salt, and pepper color ash to white. In recent years, silver hair color has been a fashion trend that many girls love. They find ways to dye their hair to have a unique color for themselves.
Some gray-haired people often desire and love the opposite. They feel gray hair is a sign of age and will usually change to their former youthful black color.
White Hair
Finally, another scarce hair color is white. White hair is because the person’s hair has no color pigment. This trait exists in people with albinism.
Albinism is a disease that prevents the human body or organism from producing pigment. Albino plants will be pure white, while albino humans and animals will have pinkish-white bodies and red eyes due to the blood color.
Only about 0.1% of the population has albinism and has pure white hair. Yet, due to a lack of pigment protection, people with albinism are more susceptible to skin cancers or damaged hair than others.
Why Are Some Hair Colors Rare?
You may be wondering why some hair colors are rarer than others. Several factors are associated with this trait, including genetics, pigments, and diseases.
Genetic Traits
Your hair color comes from pigment genes. If your parents have red hair, you are more likely to have red hair than other hair colors.
For genes that determine hair color, some genes are dominant over others. When also working in an individual’s genetic makeup to confer physical traits, the dominant gene overwhelms the recessive gene and manifests its feature.
Most genes that produce rare colors are recessive. That means only if your parents carry the gene for the occasional color do you have a chance to have that color hair.
This biological property makes red and blonde hair colors less likely than other colors.
Pigment Distribution
Within the same hair color, there are also different shades. It is due to varying concentrations of the two pigments, Eumelanin, and Pheomelanin, in your hair.
Dark melanin pigments will overwhelm Pheomelanin when they appear. People with red or blonde hair have deficient Eumelanin levels, while their hair is mainly concentrated in Pheomelanin.
The different combinations of these two pigments lead to various hair colors and shades.
Pathological
Rare hair color can also come from medical conditions. The premature aging disease leads to gray or salt-and-pepper hair color in young people.
Individuals with albinism will often have pure white hair. Since not many people have such congenital disorders, the hair colors they own will become rarer.
Conclusion
Black hair color is the most popular color in the world. Meanwhile, the rarest hair colors on the planet are red, blonde, brown, gray, and white.
These shades come from parents’ genetics, synthetic pigments, and medical conditions. This article answers the question: What is the rarest hair color?
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I am Thomas Taw, the CEO of CITIZENSNIPS. I have experience in hair product development and chemical research, as well as sustainable resource engineering. In 2009, I co-created Sunsilk, one of the world's leading haircare brands. More recently, I was the CEO of SMOKINGPANDA LTD. I am a professional with a strong track record in delivering tangible results. Full his bio.
