• Question: Is there a reason why people have different hair colors?

    Asked by shamail155 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 9 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 9 Mar 2014:

      from my knowledge the genetics of this is not fully understood. but our hair follicles contain a pigment melanin. there are three main types of melanin pigment. depending on which pigment is in your hair follicles results in peole having different hair colours.

    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      It’s thought hair colour is controlled by a few different genes. These genes control how much and what type of pigment you have in your hair follicles. The different levels of these pigments work together to produce different shades of hair colour.

    • Photo: Amar Joshi

      Amar Joshi answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Hair colour is controlled by genetics. But there are many genes which work together to create the colour and texture of hair. Darker colours tend to be more dominant than lighter colours, so if your mum has blonde hair and your dad has dar brown hair you are more likely to have dark hair.

      Hair colour, like skin colour, is a natural form of sun protection. This is why people who live neat the equator have dark hair and dark skin, while people there are lots of fair skinned, blonde haired people in Sweden.

    • Photo: Leah Fitzsimmons

      Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      There is still plenty of research going on into hair colour. For example many people have heard that, because darker colouring is dominant over lighter colours in genetic experiments, blonde people will become extinct in the near future. This is a myth!
      Mostly because it is based on an overly simplified maths about how genes are inherited and doesn’t take into account biases that are introduced by how people behave. That means that the children of dark haired people aren’t always dark haired (although they very often are) and that people don’t always behave as you might expect!

    • Photo: Matthew Lam

      Matthew Lam answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      All correct – it’s one of those things we don’t actually know the answer too. We know there are chemicals called pigments which colour the hair but we don’t know exactly how the genetics work, apart from the fact that brown hair is dominant over blonde hair, so two brown haired parents can still have a blonde haired child.

      The reason for this is because genes come in pairs (one from your mother and one from your father). So your Mum could have a Brown gene and a blonde gene – giving brown hair because Brown is dominant over blonde. If your father has the same set of genes (one brown, one blonde), they too will have brown hair but could have a child that has blonde hair by inheriting the blonde gene from mum and the blonde gene from dad.

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