Red for danger

‘Gentlemen prefer blondes,’ Anita Loos pronounced, ‘but gentlemen marry brunettes.’ Quite what they do with redheads she never revealed (and I’ve often wondered), but with Red: A Natural History of the Redhead, Jacky Colliss Harvey sets out to discover everything — what it takes to make a redhead, where in the world they come from and why they exist at all; whether redheads are actually different or just treated differently; how they got their reputation, what that reputation might be and whether they deserve it.

The history begins some 40,000 years ago, we are told, when the gene for red hair was carried from ‘the grasslands of Central Asia’ to Europe. We encounter the bones of red-headed Neanderthals in a Spanish cave, red-headed Thracians depicted in ancient Greek art, a red-haired Boudicca, red-headed Scythians, vilified red-haired Jews in medieval Europe and so on across the centuries until redheads are pocketed at their highest density (of 13 per cent, compared with fewer than one per cent worldwide) in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Udmurt Republic (at the top of the Volga). This is a history of migration, the author contends, until it reaches these corners ‘set apart from the great ebb and flow of the human ocean’ and the ‘liminal populations’ in those regions. At this point the ‘fixing of red hair among these liminal populations’ becomes ‘a phenomenon that exists logically and obviously’ — i.e. a numbers game.

A redhead herself, and feeling her character defined by that accident of genetics, Colliss Harvey’s project is personal: she is investigating a tribe of which she is a member. When she traces the history of redheads and catalogues the redheads of history, art, literature, cinema and fairytale, she communicates to her reader a feeling of intense solidarity with her subject.