• Question: Why do we have different colour hair?

    Asked by jb to Claire, Liad, Ruth, Ryan, Mako on 14 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Ryan Cheale

      Ryan Cheale answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Human hair is different depending on pigments and the amount of melanin contained.

      Think of it this way imagine you had one colour and it had X amount of melanin. Now when you mix another colour in or have a less dense amount of X then the colour changes. Similar principle.

      eumelanin and pheomelanin are the chemicals involved. If there is more eumelaning the darker it is and vice versa.

    • Photo: Ruth Elderfield

      Ruth Elderfield answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Our genes, the book of instructions inside every cell in our bodies instructs the cells which produce our hair what colour it should be, by the balance of different pigments it produces (see Ryan’s answer). Your are a product of who you got your genes from, sometimes your hair colour is the same as your parents, sometime it can be your grandparents or even their grandparents, it all depends on how the genes from your parents interact, as you get one copy of the instructions from each parent, and they could have passed on either of their two copies, so different children from the same parent can have different hair colours. Mix that in with hair being a protective covering evolved in different places to suit different conditions (more or less hot sun) and you have more variations of what colours and curls we all have.

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