For centuries, they were oppressed, persecuted, and even burned at the stake. People with fiery hair color were previously doomed to misfortune. Today, many dream of stunning hair color. So Italians. It would seem that all the fair sex in Italy are brunettes. But there are still surprising exceptions. We found out where the first redheads nevertheless appeared.
Marina Rosso (MarinaRosso.com), a photographer and researcher from Udine (Udine), despite her last name (translated from Italian - “red”) can not boast of red curls. However, after one trial that took place in 2011, she firmly set out to check whether the red-haired people have such a hard time these days, like a couple of years ago, and whether this hair color is popular today.
The thing is that in 2011 a court ruled that men with carrot-colored hair are not the most coveted donors in a sperm bank due to the reluctance of modern couples to have children with red hair.
“It turns out that sperm bank customers just don't want red-haired children,” confirms Rosso, who conducted her own study of this fact. “They often don’t even hide that they don’t like that hair color and would prefer a different one.” The jury, which was present at the trial in 2011, supported the Danish firm Cyros’s insistence that red men be forbidden to donate sperm. By the way, in Ireland this situation is not observed - people with fiery hair color are a usual thing there.
Obsessed with the goal of “preserving diversity,” Rosso decided to classify people with red hair color according to genetic variations. As a result, the researcher got 48 categories for distinguishing them. Rosso traveled all over Europe, looking for participants in her experiment, and recorded data such as height, gender, physique, eye color and hair type. She traveled to Italy, the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway and Poland, photographing people. When she returned home, there were 204 photographs in her file cabinet.
Of all of them, she chose 47 portraits on which carriers of an unusual gene were depicted, and organized an exhibition, which was later held in Turin, in Milan and in Rome. The researcher claims that many respondents admitted that they were often abused at school precisely because of their unusual hair color. Rosso also managed to find out that this unusual discrimination made the redheads be friends with each other. However, upon reaching 30 years of age, the tendency toward humiliation did not appear among the respondents.
“It's not that they feel confident only after they are in their fourth decade. The thing is that in youth they hate their hair color, and in adulthood they begin to be proud of it. ”
Rosso often recalls the story of one of the participants in her study, who, by the way, is Italian. “Not that my hair irritated me. I was simply surprised by the very fact that I have red hair - in my family, no one had such a gene. Perhaps I was more fortunate than others - in my youth they only made fun of me about this. At first, I blamed everything on my Irish roots for my mother. But then I went to Sicily, my father came from there, and ended up in a whole family of Sicilian red-haired women with blue eyes, fair skin and a lot of freckles. ”
“My uncle gave me a real family history lesson, after which everything fell into place. “You are a descendant of the Normans,” he said, referring to the Norman invasion of Sicily in 1061. Turns out that the Normans, who arrived on the island under the command of Roger I, “brought” this gene to Sicily, and after that it spread to the rest of Italy.»
Rosso estimated that red-haired Italians make up only one percent of the total population of the country. However, owners of fiery hair color in Italy live much better than carriers of an amazing gene in other countries - Italians admire the unusual color, and not make fun of it. “In Italian, you won’t even find words that could somehow call redheads, while in English there are just a lot of them,” the researcher is sure.
