Yes, I'm a typical redhead and I have a boiling point,just as well I'm with Morgan, she's slow to anger and helps me remain calmer longer, which does me good!
A common belief about redheads is that they have fiery tempers and sharp tongues. In Anne of Green Gables, a character says of Anne Shirley, the redheaded heroine, that "her temper matches her hair", while in The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield remarks that "People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie [his dead brother] never did, and he had very red hair."
During the early stages of modern medicine, red hair was thought to be a sign of a sanguine temperament. In the Indian medicinal practice of Ayurveda, redheads are seen as most likely to have a Pitta temperament.
Another belief is that redheads are highly sexed; for example, Jonathan Swift satirizes redhead stereotypes in part four of Gulliver's Travels, "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms," when he writes that: "It is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity." Swift goes on to write that "neither was the hair of this brute [a Yahoo] of a red colour (which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular) but black as a sloe". Such beliefs were given a veneer of scientific credibility in the 19th century by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero. They concluded that red hair was associated with crimes of lust, and claimed that 48% of "criminal women" were redheads.
Media, fashion and art Queen Elizabeth I of England was a redhead, and during the Elizabethan era in England, red hair was fashionable for women. In modern times, red hair is subject to fashion trends; celebrities such as Nicole Kidman, Alyson Hannigan, Marcia Cross, Christina Hendricks, Emma Stone and Geri Halliwell can boost sales of red hair dye.
Sometimes, red hair darkens as people get older, becoming a more brownish color or losing some of its vividness. This leads some to associate red hair with youthfulness, a quality that is generally considered desirable. In several countries such as India, Iran, Bangladesh and Pakistan, henna and saffron are used on hair to give it a bright red appearance.
Many painters have exhibited a fascination with red hair. The hair color "Titian" takes its name from the artist Titian, who often painted women with red hair. Early Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli's famous painting The Birth of Venus depicts the mythological goddess Venus as a redhead. Other painters notable for their redheads include the Pre-Raphaelites, Edmund Leighton, Modigliani, and Gustav Klimt.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Red-Headed League" (1891) involves a man who is asked to become a member of a mysterious group of red-headed people. The 1943 film DuBarry Was a Lady featured red-heads Lucille Ball and Red Skelton in Technicolor.
Notable fictional characters with red hair includes Jean Grey, Red Sonja, Mystique, and Poison Ivy.
A book of photographs of red haired people was published in 2020, Gingers by Kieran Dodds (2020).
Prejudice and discrimination against redheads Medieval beliefs
Barbarossa (Redbeard), Ottoman Admiral Red hair was thought to be a mark of a beastly sexual desire and moral degeneration. A savage red-haired man is portrayed in the fable by Grimm brothers (Der Eisenhans) as the spirit of the forest of iron. Theophilus Presbyter describes how the blood of a red-haired young man is necessary to create gold from copper, in a mixture with the ashes of a basilisk.
Montague Summers, in his translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, notes that red hair and green eyes were thought to be the sign of a witch, a werewolf or a vampire during the Middle Ages;
Those whose hair is red, of a certain peculiar shade, are unmistakably vampires. It is significant that in ancient Egypt, as Manetho tells us, human sacrifices were offered at the grave of Osiris, and the victims were red-haired men who were burned, their ashes being scattered far and wide by winnowing-fans. It is held by some authorities that this was done to fertilize the fields and produce a bounteous harvest, red-hair symbolizing the golden wealth of the corn. But these men were called Typhonians, and were representatives not of Osiris but of his evil rival Typhon, whose hair was red.
Medieval antisemitism. During the Spanish Inquisition, people of red hair were identified as Jewish and isolated for persecution. In Medieval Italy and Spain, red hair was associated with the heretical nature of Jews and their rejection of Jesus, and thus Judas Iscariot was commonly depicted as red-haired in Italian and Spanish art. Writers from Shakespeare to Dickens would identify Jewish characters by giving them red hair, with red-hair being given by the authors to villainous Jewish characters such as Shylock and Fagin. The antisemitic association persisted into modern times in Soviet Russia. The medieval prejudice against red-hair may have derived from the Ancient biblical tradition, in relation to biblical figures such as Esau and King David. The Ancient historian Josephus would mistranslate the Hebrew Torah to describe the more positive figure of King David as 'golden haired', in contrast to the negative figure of Esau, even though the original Hebrew Torah implies that both King David and Esau had 'fiery red hair'.
Modern-day discrimination "Carrot head" redirects here. For the French novel, see Poil de carotte. In his 1885 book I Say No, Wilkie Collins wrote "The prejudice against habitual silence, among the lower order of the people, is almost as inveterate as the prejudice against red hair."
In his 1895 memoir and history The Gurneys of Earlham, Augustus John Cuthbert Hare described an incident of harassment: "The second son, John, was born in 1750. As a boy he had bright red hair, and it is amusingly recorded that one day in the streets of Norwich a number of boys followed him, pointing to his red locks and saying, "Look at that boy; he's got a bonfire on the top of his head," and that John Gurney was so disgusted that he went to a barber's, had his head shaved, and went home in a wig. He grew up, however, a remarkably attractive-looking young man."
In British English, the word "ginger" is sometimes used to describe red-headed people (at times in an insulting manner), with terms such as "gingerphobia" and "gingerism" used by the British media. In Britain, redheads are also sometimes referred to disparagingly as "carrot tops" and "carrot heads". (The comedian "Carrot Top" uses this stage name.) "Gingerism" has been compared to racism, although this is widely disputed, and bodies such as the UK Commission for Racial Equality do not monitor cases of discrimination and hate crimes against redheads.
Nonetheless, individuals and families in Britain are targeted for harassment and violence because of their hair colour. In 2003, a 20-year-old was stabbed in the back for "being ginger". In 2007, a UK woman won an award from a tribunal after being sexually harassed and receiving abuse because of her red hair; in the same year, a family in Newcastle upon Tyne, was forced to move twice after being targeted for abuse and hate crime on account of their red hair. In May 2009, a schoolboy committed suicide after being bullied for having red hair. In 2013, a fourteen-year-old boy in Lincoln had his right arm broken and his head stamped on by three men who attacked him "just because he had red hair". The three men were subsequently jailed for a combined total of ten years and one month for the attack. A possible fringe theory explaining the historical and modern mistreatment of red-heads supposedly stems from Roman subjugation and consequent persecution of Celtic Nations when arriving in the British Isles.
This prejudice has been satirised on a number of TV shows. English comedian Catherine Tate (herself a redhead) appeared as a red-haired character in a running sketch of her series The Catherine Tate Show. The sketch saw fictional character Sandra Kemp, who was forced to seek solace in a refuge for ginger people because she had been ostracised from society. The British comedy Bo' Selecta! (starring redhead Leigh Francis) featured a spoof documentary which involved a caricature of Mick Hucknall presenting a show in which celebrities (played by themselves) dyed their hair red for a day and went about daily life being insulted by people. (Hucknall, who says that he has repeatedly faced prejudice or been described as ugly on account of his hair colour, argues that Gingerism should be described as a form of racism.) Comedian Tim Minchin, himself a redhead, also covered the topic in his song "Prejudice".
The pejorative use of the word "ginger" and related discrimination was used to illustrate a point about racism and prejudice in the "Ginger Kids", "Le Petit Tourette", "It's a Jersey Thing" and "Fatbeard" episodes of South Park.
Film and television programmes often portray school bullies as having red hair. However, children with red hair are often themselves targeted by bullies; "Somebody with ginger hair will stand out from the crowd," says anti-bullying expert Louise Burfitt-Dons.
In Australian slang, redheads are often nicknamed "Blue" or "Bluey". More recently, they have been referred to as "rangas" (a word derived from the red-haired ape, the orangutan), sometimes with derogatory connotations. The word "rufus" has been used in both Australian and British slang to refer to red-headed people;[94] based on a variant of rufous, a reddish-brown color.
In November 2008 social networking website Facebook received criticism after a 'Kick a Ginger' group, which aimed to establish a "National Kick a Ginger Day" on 20 November, acquired almost 5,000 members. A 14-year-old boy from Vancouver who ran the Facebook group was subjected to an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for possible hate crimes.
In December 2009 British supermarket chain Tesco withdrew a Christmas card which had the image of a child with red hair sitting on the lap of Father Christmas, and the words: "Santa loves all kids. Even ginger ones" after customers complained the card was offensive.
In October 2010, Harriet Harman, the former Equality Minister in the British government under Labour, faced accusations of prejudice after she described the red-haired Treasury secretary Danny Alexander as a "ginger rodent". Alexander responded to the insult by stating that he was "proud to be ginger". Harman was subsequently forced to apologise for the comment, after facing criticism for prejudice against a minority group.
In September 2011, Cryos International, one of the world's largest sperm banks, announced that it would no longer accept donations from red-haired men due to low demand from women seeking artificial insemination.
Use of term in Singapore and Malaysia The term ang mo (Chinese: 红毛; pinyin: hóng máo; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: âng-mo͘) in Hokkien (Min Nan) Chinese, meaning "red-haired", is used in Malaysia and Singapore, although it refers to all white people, never exclusively people with red hair. The epithet is sometimes rendered as ang mo kui (红毛鬼) meaning "red-haired devil", similar to the Cantonese term gweilo ("foreign devil"). Thus it is viewed as racist and derogatory by some people. Others, however, maintain it is acceptable. Despite this ambiguity, it is a widely used term. It appears, for instance, in Singaporean newspapers such as The Straits Times, and in television programmes and films.
The Chinese characters for ang mo are the same as those in the historical Japanese term Kōmō (紅毛), which was used during the Edo period (1603–1868) as an epithet for Dutch or Northern European people. It primarily referred to Dutch traders who were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan during Sakoku, its 200-year period of isolation.
The historic fortress Fort San Domingo in Tamsui, Taiwan was nicknamed ang mo sia (紅毛城).
The name "Rory" The mainly masculine given name Rory - a name of Goidelic origin, which is an anglicisation of the Irish: Ruairí/Ruaidhrí/Ruaidhrígh/Raidhrígh, Scottish Gaelic: Ruairidh and Manx: Rauree which is common to the Irish, Highland Scots and their diasporas - means "red-haired king", from ruadh ("red-haired" or "rusty") and rígh ("king"). However, present bearers of the name are by no means all red-haired themeselves.
Red hair festivals
There has been an annual Redhead Day festival in the Netherlands that attracts red-haired participants from around the world. The festival was held in Breda, a city in the south east of the Netherlands, prior to 2019, when it moved to Tilburg. It attracts participants from over 80 different countries. The international event began in 2005, when Dutch painter Bart Rouwenhorst decided he wanted to paint 15 redheads.
The Irish Redhead Convention, held in late August in County Cork since 2011, claims to be a global celebration and attracts people from several continents. The celebrations include crowning the ginger King and Queen, competitions for the best red eyebrows and most freckles per square inch, orchestral concerts and carrot throwing competitions.
A smaller red-hair day festival is held since 2013 by the UK's anti bullying alliance in London, with the aim of instilling pride in having red-hair.
Since 2014, a red-hair event is held in Israel, at Kibbutz Gezer (Carrot), held for the local Israeli red hair community, including both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi red-heads. However, the number of attendees has to be restricted due to the risk of rocket attacks, leading to anger in the red-hair community. The organizers state; "The event is a good thing for many redheads, who had been embarrassed about being redheads before."
The first and only festival for red heads in the United States was launched in 2015. Held in Highwood, Illinois, Redhead Days draws participants from across the United States.
A festival to celebrate the red-haired people is held annually in Izhevsk (Russia), the capital of Udmurtia, since 2004.
MC1R Magazine is a publication for red-haired people worldwide, based in Hamburg, Germany.
Religious and mythological traditions In ancient Egypt red hair was associated with the deity Set and Ramesses II had it.
In the Iliad, Achilles' hair is described as ksanthēs (ξανθῆς), usually translated as blonde, or golden but sometimes as red or tawny. His son Neoptolemus also bears the name Pyrrhus, a possible reference to his own red hair.
The Norse god Thor is usually described as having red hair.
Mary Magdalene is commonly portrayed with long red hair, as in the 1859 painting by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys. The Hebrew word usually translated "ruddy" or "reddish-brown" (admoni אדמוני, from the root ADM אדם, see also Adam and Edom) was used to describe both Esau and David.
Early artistic representations of Mary Magdalene usually depict her as having long flowing red hair, although a description of her hair color was never mentioned in the Bible, and it is possible the color is an effect caused by pigment degradation in the ancient paint.
Judas Iscariot is also represented with red hair in Spanish culture and in the works of William Shakespeare, reinforcing the negative stereotype.
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