The science behind your hair colour
London academics have revealed that 124 genes - 100 more than previously known - play a major role in determining the colour of our hair.
The Evening Standard reports that the new research, from King’s College London and Erasmus university in Rotterdam, could help doctors better understand conditions linked to pigmentation, such as skin, testicular, prostate and ovarian cancers and vitiligo, which causes white “patching” of the skin. It could even assist forensic scientists in detecting the hair colour of criminals from DNA samples found at crime scenes.
Professor Tim Spector, from King’s College, joint lead author of the study, said: “Our work helps us to understand what causes human diversity in appearance by showing how genes involved in pigmentation subtly adapted to external environments and even social interactions during our evolution.
“We found that women have significantly fairer hair than men, which reflects how important cultural practices and sexual preferences are in shaping our genes and biology.”
The study, in the journal Nature Genetics, asked 300,000 people to describe their natural hair colour and compared this with their genetic information from the UK Biobank and other sources.
It was found that the new genes were more accurate than those already known in predicting hair colour. Interestingly, more women described themselves as blonde than those who were found to be naturally blonde. Women were also three times less likely to identify as having dark hair than men.
Although scientists won't rule out that some women might have been mistaken about their hair colour, in the past differences have been attributed to sexual preferences, with women supposedly preferring men with dark hair and men preferring blonde women.
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