Why is being a redhead bad

There is no makeup that can stop the facial redness, that redness fights its way through to the surface at all costs. Chelsea Fagan founded the blog The Financial Diet. She is on Twitter. Do not make it contingent on their acceptance of you or their feelings for you. All that matters is that you are happy with the person you are becoming. All that matters is that you like yourself, that you are proud of what you are putting out into the world. You are in charge of your joy, of your worth.

You get to be your own validation. Sign up for the Thought Catalog Weekly and get the best stories from the week to your inbox every Friday. You may unsubscribe at any time. By subscribing, you agree to the terms of our Privacy Statement. Chelsea Fagan 1. Makeup not understanding you as a human. There is an entire alternate solar system of knowledge and its opposite circling around up there. What would once have been completely beyond human imagination is now as quotidian as a grocery list, and it seems we are all putting them together.

In this universe of information and of unformation, some are born redheaded, some achieve it, and some poor souls simply have it thrust upon them. There are endless lists of supposed historical redheads out there, a tangle that links one site to another like binary mycelia; layers of space junk that typify red- heads as impulsive, irrational, quick-tempered, passionate, and iconoclastic; great drifting rafts of internet factoids currently the most notorious: the notion that redheads are facing extinction , with repetition alone creating a kind of false positive, a sort of virtual truth by citation.

It takes Christopher Robin to point out that the pair are simply following their own ever-increasing footprints in a circle around a tree. This book will endeavor not to add to the population of woozles. Red is a color that has exceptional resonance for our species.

And it is full of contradictions. It is the color of love, but also that of war; we see red when furiously angry, yet send our love a red, red rose; it is the color of blood, and can thus symbolize both life and death, and in the form of red ochre or other natural pigments scattered over the dead, it has played a part in the funerary rites of civilizations from the Minoans to the Mayans.

Our worst sins are scarlet, according to the prophet Isaiah, and it is the color of Satan in much Western art, but it is the color of luck and prosperity in the East. It is universally recognized as the color of warning, in red for danger; it is the color of sex in red-light districts across the planet. The symbolism and associations of red hair embody all these opposites and more. In the aristocracy of skin, as the historian Noel Ignatiev has described it, and in the Western world of the twenty-first century, discrimination is rarely overtly practiced against those with white skin.

Yet people still express biases against red hair in language and in attitudes of unthinking mistrust that they would no longer dream of espousing or of exposing if the subject were skin color, or religion, or sexual orientation. And these expressions of prejudice slip under the radar precisely because by and large there is almost no difference in appearance aside from the hair between those discriminating against it and those being discriminated against.

In brief, red hair in men equals bad, in women equals good, or at least sexually interesting. But even within this simplistic categorization there is a glaring contradiction, since culturally it seems we can get our heads around red-haired men as both psychopathically violent Viking berserkers; or in the UK, the drunk swaying down the street with a can of super-strength lager in one fist and on his head a comically oversize tartan beret, complete with fuzz of fake ginger hair; or even Animal from The Muppets , and as denatured, unmasculine, and wimpish Napoleon Dynamite, for example, or Rod and Todd Flanders from The Simpsons.

Redheaded women are supposedly the least desired by their peers of the opposite sex among American college students; yet and I have to say, this has been my own experience the popular construct of the female redhead is often profoundly eroticized and escapes the rules and morality applied to the rest of female society.

This happens with red hair, time and again. Its presence, and attitudes toward it—the cultural stereotyping, cultural usage, cultural development—link one historical period, one civilization, to another, sometimes in the most surprising ways and very often flying in the face of all logic and common sense as well.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the history of red hair is the way these links run on through time. You begin by investigating the impact of redheaded Thracian slaves in Athens more than 2, years ago and end at Ronald McDonald. You examine the workings of recessive characteristics and genetic drift in isolated populations and come to a stop at the Wildlings in Game of Thrones.

You explore depictions of Mary Magdalene and find yourself at Christina Hendricks. Why is the Magdalene so often depicted as a redhead? What possible reason can there be for that? If there ever was a specific individual of this name which is a big assumption—the Magdalene as the Western church created her is a conflation of a number of different Biblical characters , her name suggests that she could have been a native of Magdala, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, well below the forty-fifth parallel.

What, then, for so many artists, from the medieval period onward, is the explanation for showing Mary Magdalene with red hair? What message did that convey to an audience five hundred years ago?

What might it tell us about that audience? And what might it illuminate about our own attitudes toward red hair today? They like the turning shades and tints, they relish the glint and gleam of light upon it and the way that light bounces off the pale skin that so often goes with it. But the meaning of the red hair of the Magdalene takes one somewhere else altogether. It reflects the fact that the version of Mary Magdalene that the Western church has always found most fascinating is that of a reformed prostitute, a penitent whore, and culturally, for centuries, red hair in women has been linked with carnality and with prostitution.

It still is today. And this leads back to one of the stereotypes that began this discussion, and back to one of the greatest contradictions in the cultural history of the redhead: the centuries-long linkage between red-haired women and sexual desirability, and the fact that despite, at the time of this writing, the naturally red-haired Sherlock actor, Benedict Cumberbatch, being voted sexiest actor on the planet the exact opposite seems to hold true for redheaded men.

This book is a synoptic overview of red hair and redheaded-ness: scientifically, historically, culturally, and artistically. It will use examples from art, from literature, and, as we come up to the present day, from film and advertising, too. It will discuss red hair not just as a physiological but as a cultural phenomenon, both as it has been in the past and as it is now. Redheads have genes to thank for their tresses.

Research shows red hair usually results from a mutation in a gene called MC1R , which codes for the melanocortin-1 receptor. The pigment found in redhair that makes it red is called pheomelanin. But redheads as a group have more in common than only their hair color -- certain health conditions appear to be more common among people with red hair. Redheads appear to be more sensitive to pain, and less sensitive to the kinds of local anesthesia used as the dentists, research recent suggests.

A study found that redheads required significantly more anesthetic in order to block pain from an unpleasant electric stimulation. Another study found that redheads are more sensitive to sensations of cold and hot, and that the dental anesthetic lidocaine is less effective for redheads. The MC! R gene that can cause red hair codes for a receptor that is related to a family of receptors involved in perceiving pain, which may explain why mutations in MC1R would increase pain perception.

Because of their increased pain sensitivity and reduced tolerance to anesthesia, redheads may avoid the dentist.