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Posted: 13-06-2010 17:07 Post subject:

I think its something along the lines of charaterology and personlogy and for some reason in art history class they taught us its fake. A bit off topic. Theres still books being published about similar topics though, especially chinese characterology.

Posted: 13-06-2010 21:56 Post subject:

Just dipped into this thread from the beginning. What a load of twaddle . Replace red haired with dark skinned and see how (much of the early) stuff reads and consider if it would have run to so many pages.

People actually prejudge a potential friend or mate on the basis of frikken HAIR colour?

I'm NOT talking about the newer posts chatting about the pop video but the earnest postings a few years ago. Jeeze Confused

Posted: 13-06-2010 22:40 Post subject:

Yup, s'pathetic innit.

I love it when this stupid subject crops up in convo with acquaintances or workemates. Gives me the chance to snort and say 'Bollocks!' a lot. Laughing

Posted: 09-09-2010 16:23 Post subject:

Back in my schooldays we had an art teacher who used to run his hand through my (naturally red) hair and say in a slightly creepy voice, "only 13% of the world has natural red hair". Blimey...these days he'd be on some sort of register.

Posted: 09-09-2010 18:35 Post subject:

Posted: 16-09-2010 10:43 Post subject:

Ha! I never thought of that. Right, I'm straight on the phone to Claims Direct. Easy street here I come.

Posted: 16-09-2010 13:13 Post subject:

Posted: 23-08-2011 20:10 Post subject:

Amusing programme here about red hair and Scots, and how the subjects intersect:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013n71d

Richard Herring presents it, so as you can imagine it's immensely tasteful. For the record, I've never worn a CU Jimmy bunnet in my life.

Posted: 17-09-2011 11:43 Post subject:

Sperm bank turns down redheads
The world's largest sperm bank has started turning down redheaded donors because there is too little demand for their sperm.
By Richard Orange [!!]
4:41PM BST 16 Sep 2011

Ole Schou, Cryos's director, said that there had been a surge in donations in recent years, allowing the facility to become much more picky about its donors.

"There are too many redheads in relation to demand," he told told Danish newspaper Ekstrabladet. "I do not think you chose a redhead, unless the partner - for example, the sterile male - has red hair, or because the lone woman has a preference for redheads. And that's perhaps not so many, especially in the latter case."

Mr Schou said the only reliable demand for sperm from redheaded donors [is] from Ireland, where he said it sold “like hot cakes”. Cool

Cryos’s stores have now reached their peak capacity of 70 litres of semen, and Mr Schou has a waiting list of 600 donors.
He said sperm from donors with brown hair and brown eyes was particularly in demand, because of the bank’s large customer base in Spain, Italy and Greece.

Indian sperm was also hard to find, he said, because India does not allow sperm or eggs to be exported, causing a problem for childless international Indians.

Cryos pays donors up to $500 (£316), and sends its semen to over 65 countries worldwide.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/denmark/8768598/Sperm-bank-turns-down-redheads.html

Posted: 08-11-2012 00:02 Post subject:

Not strictly about personality, but still interesting:

DNA project aims to count Scots redheads

A project is being launched which aims to find out how many people in Scotland carry the red hair gene.
Researchers from the ScotlandsDNA project also hope to discover why Scotland appears to have the most red-headed people in the world.
Only about 1-2% of the world's population has red hair, but in Scotland the figure is much higher at around 13% or about 650,000 people. Shocked

The information will be used to make a "ginger" map of the British Isles.

Researchers at the ScotlandsDNA project believe the figure for Scottish red hair gene carriers may be much higher, and could be as many as 1.6m.
A person who doesn't have red hair can still produce red haired children if their partner is a carrier of a gene.
Red hair appears in people with two copies of a recessive gene on chromosome 16 which causes a mutation in the MC1R protein and can often skip generations.

Contrary to popular belief, the gene is not dying out and will most likely continue for many generations to come.
The ScotlandsDNA project is launching a new test which costs £25 and will tell participants whether or not they're a carrier of a red haired gene

It will also inform them of which of three types of the gene they have, and possibly provide some insight into why Scotland is the most red-headed nation on earth.

Managing director of ScotlandsDNA, Alastair Moffat is keen to map the number of possible carriers of the gene in Scotland and attempt to explain why we have so many Scots red-heads.
"It's not necessarily the people who have red hair that interest us at ScotlandsDNA, what we want to do is discover who carries the red hair gene variant," Mr Moffat told BBC Scotland.
"I think that's a much larger number. For example, in my own family, I have three kids and two of them have red hair - and while I haven't got much hair, it's certainly not red, and neither has my wife.
"In either side of our families, there was no red hair - and I thought, where has this come from? That was what got me interested.

"We're looking at people who have already had their DNA tested by Scotland's DNA, which is simple for us to do.
"But they have to be tested first, and then we can tell them if they're carriers of the red-head variant."

All physical colouring is a mixture of two pigments; black melanin and red/yellow melanin, but in red-heads a particular receptor in the pathway for pigmentation, MC1R, is disrupted and black melanin is suppressed while red/yellow melanin is allowed to be made.
The result is red hair, light skin colour, often freckles and a greater sensitivity to sunlight.

The three types of red-head gene are:

Cysteine-red (or R151C) is carried by 10% of British people
Tryptophan-red (or R160W) is carried by 9% of British people
Histidine-red (or D294H) is carried by 2.5% of British people

There are other, much rarer variants, but for a child to have red hair, both parents must be carriers and there is a 25% chance that their offspring will have it, which is known as "recessive inheritance".

Mr Moffat believes the origins of the gene are more an adaptation to Scotland's poor weather.
Mr Moffat added: "I think it's to do with sunshine - we all need vitamin D from sunshine, but Scotland is cloudy, we have an Atlantic climate and we need light skin to get as much vitamin D from the Sun as possible."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20237511

Posted: 04-03-2013 17:34 Post subject:

A couple of days ago I saw a man with a red beard and hair, except he only had hair on the sides of his head - he was bald on top. This seemed unusual, as I don't think I've ever seen another balding red head.

I can think of two possible reasons for this rarity:

1. Being red-headed means you're less likely to go bald
or
2. Red-heads go grey before they go bald.

Anyone got any other observations on this topic?

Posted: 04-03-2013 17:37 Post subject:

Posted: 04-03-2013 18:03 Post subject:

Posted: 04-03-2013 18:26 Post subject:

Posted: 04-03-2013 18:52 Post subject:

Never heard of Ron Howard before (not much into fillums nowadays).

And I'd never thought of Clive Anderson as being red-headed!

Interesting to learn that red-heads are more likely to go bald, however. Either I just never saw a balding ginger before, or my memory's going... Sad

..but I still have some hair - I must get a haircut tomorrow!