Red hair says carrots

If you’re familiar with this blog and its website, you are probably aware of the ambiguous attitude towards red hair: over the centuries and millennia, it was loved and hated at the same time. Painters definitely favoured red hair over any other hair colour, while common people linked it to disloyalty and treachery (see, for instance, all the proverbs we have gathered). 

Sometimes we even have what it seems a nearly schizophrenic attitude. For esample, as you can read here, Peter the Great of Russia issued a decree forbidding redheads to hold any public office, testifying in courts and working on ships, because, he said, "God marks the rascal!" However, according to our research, Peter the Great was a redhead himself. 

Peter the Great of Russia

 

My first thought, when I read of this decree, was that Peter the Great made a distinction between very light red hair (orange hair) and copper hair, so, when he referred to redheads, he was in fact referring only to people with orange-coloured hair. I didn’t have any evidence of that, though.

Few weeks ago I was re-reading a novel by Agatha Christie, Appointment with Death. One of the characters, a young woman, has got beautiful red-golden hair and another character comments on it and says: “The sun was in my eyes, so I couldn’t quite see. But I don’t think the hair was red—just bronze. I’m so fond of that coppery bronze hair! Red hair always says carrots to me!”

So, it seems that for certain people the adjective red only applied to carrot/orange hair, while the darker shade was, for them, bronze or copper, not red. This carrot shade wasn’t considered very beautiful, unlike the copper one. It also came to my mind the famous quote from Mark Twain:

 

Now the question is: why? Was it just a matter of aesthetics? Or maybe people found it ridiculous that somebody’s hair colour was so similar to a vegetable? It Peter the Great even made a decree banning redheads from certain activities, probably it wasn’t just a matter of aesthetics or of vegetables. In some countries there are also expressions like carrot top, poil de carotte (French) and pel di carota (Italian) which can be used in a derogatory sense as well.

In the light of Mark Twain’s quote, it seems that, for whatever reason, red (carrot) hair was linked to lower classes, while the coppery/bronze shade was linked to aristocrats.  

We need to go on with our research and find out if there is any truth to this, and the reason for it.