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Red hair has always had a way of standing out. It catches the light, changes from copper to auburn to strawberry blond depending on the room, and tends to make people look twice. It’s something that today is sought after, especially by those who don’t come by it naturally.

For centuries, red hair was treated as more than a hair color. In some places, it became a sign of beauty, luck, danger, betrayal, or even witchcraft. The facts behind it are rooted in genetics, but the stories around it are pure human behavior: a little wonder, and a little fear.

The Gene Behind The Color

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The science behind red hair is much clearer than the old folklore around it. Red hair is strongly tied to variants in the MC1R gene, which helps control the type of melanin the body makes. Certain MC1R variants reduce the body’s ability to make eumelanin, the brown-black pigment, and shift pigment production toward pheomelanin, the red-yellow pigment.

That genetic pattern helps explain why red hair can seem to pop up out of nowhere in a family. DermNet describes red hair as usually autosomal recessive, which means a person often needs two variant copies of the gene, one from each parent, for the trait to show fully. This is how a family can carry the “red hair gene” without it showing up for a few generations, before suddenly appearing on a newborn.

Natural red hair is rare, which is part of why it has attracted so much attention. Harvard Medical School refers to redheads as making up about one to two percent of the population, though exact numbers vary by place and ancestry. Red hair is most closely associated with people of northern and western European ancestry, especially areas historically linked with Celtic populations.

That mix of rarity and visibility gave red hair an outsized place in the imagination.

In communities where it was common enough, it could become part of local identity. In places where it was unusual, it was easier for people to treat it as strange, foreign, lucky, unlucky, or suspicious.

Red Hair Symbolism

Ancient writers sometimes treated reddish coloring as meaningful rather than simply physical. Plutarch, writing about Egyptian religious ideas, connected the Greek figure Typhon with the Egyptian Set, a figure linked with disorder and dangerous desert forces. In that context, red was tied to chaos and ritual meaning, and Plutarch described red cattle being selected for sacrifice because of that symbolic link.

That doesn’t support the more dramatic claim that red-haired people were routinely sacrificed in ancient Egypt. The safer reading is that red, as a color, carried heavy religious and symbolic weight.

Greek physiognomy gave red hair another bad turn. In the text known as Physiognomics, traditionally linked to Aristotle’s school, reddish coloring was connected with bad character through comparison with foxes.

Later Christian art helped carry some of that suspicion forward. The New Testament doesn’t describe Judas Iscariot’s appearance, but the Fitzwilliam Museum notes that medieval artists often represented Judas with red hair. Over time, that visual habit helped link red hair with betrayal in the public imagination.

Superstition

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By the early modern period, fear of witchcraft made old suspicions much more dangerous. The National Archives describes the 16th- and 17th-century witch craze as a time when people accused of consorting with the Devil could be tried and executed. In that kind of climate, any natural differences could be treated as evidence.

Physical features could become part of that suspicion. A 2024 article republished by Phys.org describes how moles, birthmarks, red hair, and other features could appear in 17th-century witchcraft accusations. Obviously, red hair isn’t associated with witchcraft, but its rarity within certain communities made red-headed folks stand out.

Folklore carried similar ideas. ICH Scotland records a fishing superstition in which fishermen might refuse to go to sea after encountering a hare, a dog, or a person with red hair. The detail feels almost comic now, but we doubt any red-headed person loved being blamed for empty nets.

New Year’s traditions had their own version of the same worry. In Ulster first-footing customs, a dark-haired man was thought to bring luck as the first visitor of the year, while women were considered unlucky, especially if they had red hair. It’s a small custom, but it shows how the same patterns kept coming back.

Some modern stereotypes still echo those older ideas, even when they’re dressed up as jokes. Redheads are still described as fiery, strange, seductive, unlucky, or unusually intense.

The curious history of red hair is really a history of how people deal with difference: sometimes with awe, sometimes with fear, and sometimes with the kind of confidence that really shouldn’t have been there in the first place.