Red Hair

N.B. The purpose of this article isn't to objectify red hair or red-headed women. Rather, it explores my own interest in red hair and its cultural presentation. I reassure you that I think all hair colours are beautiful in their own way. :)

Having been told by my hairdresser that it is not possible to dye my dark brown hair red, on the basis that it is very thick and would need bleaching first, I have become even more obsessed with the colour because of its unattainability! Sadly I shall always have to admire red hair from afar.

Here's the closest I'm going to get... and I look like Offred from The Handmaid's Tale with lipstick:

Red hair has always generated fascination, and unfortunately ridicule, which means that I am not alone in my interest. Pre-Raphaelite paintings are a great place to start when investigating the timeless appeal of the hair colour. (N.B. I know very little about art history). In Victorian England, red hair still carried much of the old medieval stigma and was not generally thought of as beautiful. Elizabeth Siddal, a young woman born in 1829 into a humble background, became a mould-breaking model and muse for the painters after she was spotted in her early twenties by artist Walter Deverell. Lizzie, as she was known, looked more like a modern-day runway model than the small, curvaceous Victorian ideal. Her striking face and luminous red hair are timelessly captured in many a pre-Raphaelite painting, most famously John Everett Millais' Ophelia. With tragic irony, Siddal's own life ended in suicide; her poor health and depression culminated in her overdose one year after the birth of her stillborn child. Despite her unhappy life, Siddal made an incredible impact on art and she is immortalised in many iconic paintings.

Culture in the 20th Century was not devoid of red-heads. One of my favourite childhood novels was the 1908 Anne of Green Gables. I identified with the protagonist, but of course I have never had a head of hair that could be ridiculed with the word "carrot." Interestingly, Anne was preoccupied with melodrama and Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot, providing a link with the pre-Raphaelites. Red-haired women graced our screens and celebrity magazines, from Judy Garland's Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), to wartime starlet Greer Garson, to Paul McCartney's actress girlfriend Jane Asher in the 1960s. In the late 20th century, screen sirens such as Kate Winslet and Nicole Kidman gave red hair a new, "sexy" lease of life. Of course, everyone from my generation understands the significance of the Weasley family in the Harry Potter series.

Recently, red hair has become very fashionable. I saw a promotion in a magazine recently for an auburn hair-dye, with a worrying tagline about keeping up with the new trend. Never one to like following the crowd, I find this mildly irritating. I believe that people should wear what they like, not what they are told to wear, and that the same goes for hair colour. For goodness sake, how can a hair colour be in fashion? It's totally ridiculous, although I hope this triumph of fiery hair and pale skin means that people recognise they live in the United Kingdom and not Ibiza, and thus there will be a reduction in the amount of fake tans. Hmm. Perhaps not. Anyway, I digress. The lining to this silver cloud of fashion is that there are more auburn locks around, and hopefully there will be a reduction in prejudice against red-headed people; please ban the word "ginger."

I shall leave you with some examples of modern-day red-headed people!