Why is Your Beard Red, But Not Your Hair?

Photo Credit

Thick and dramatically voluminous beards are trending hot on the fashion radar, and they are basically all you need to rock in order to amplify your debonair. However, if you’re growing your own beard for the very first time, and you’re noticing that your facial hair doesn’t match the color of your scalp hair, there’s really no reason to panic. There’s nothing abnormal going on with your beard, and those ginger-hued hairs are just a genetic gift that’s fallen in your lap thanks to your grandparents, or someone else in the family.

Research reveals that the follicular factor plays an important role as your hair color isn’t determined by one single gene or hereditary trait. All genes influence each other, and the red hued whiskers that you find so unexplainably odd is actually nothing but a mutation. Researchers have termed this mutation as the MC1R gene, and it occurs when you have one mutated gene that cause red hair to sprout out in the most unexpected body regions.

You see, the genes responsible for creating our hair color are known as the ‘incomplete dominant hereditary traits.’ This means that there is no single gene that will prove to be dominant over the others, on the contrary, any and every gene can make an impact. We don’t just inherit the genes of our parents, in fact, through our parents we also inherit the genes of our ancestors. All these genes pool up to form a combination, and this increases the possibilities of having a different color in the hair that sprouts on beards, armpits or pubic regions.

When one inherits the MC1R gene from both the parents, chances are, one has red beard hair and pale skin, while one MC1R gene means light ginger hairs in the places that you least want them, beards for instance?

So basically, keeping all the scientific jargon aside, if you brown hair are dominant amongst all your family members, and you have a couple redheads in the family too, the red hair gene may or may not be present within your hereditary traits. Hence proven, if you have a red beard, it’s all because you have red hair in your family. Genes always reveal themselves in different ways across different people over different generations. And if no one in your immediate family has red hair, it may be someone from your distant or far-off relatives that handed down the red-hair gene to you.

Research validates the possibility of having a hair color of a distant ancestor that disappeared from the family gene pool only to reappear coupled with a different combination of genes after a huge generational gap. It can be quite unsettling and unexpected for the parents too, but science says that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about and having a red beard is completely normal.

So, instead of being upset that your red beard doesn’t match your brown hair, why not own up to its dashing appeal with pride and confidence? But if you find them grotesquely unbearable, you can either dye them, which is an ordeal in itself, or you can just wait for them to turn grey.