The following YouTuber gives a fairly good overview. She sees the silliness, but is also genuinely sympathetic.
I mention it here as, obviously, it's redhead related, but also because it somewhat leans towards the theory that gingerness is a product of cultural melting pots. Where dark and light skin/hair tones end up in the gene pool. Though the various people making these gingers are black TikTok videos don't touch upon this idea. At least as far as I'm aware.
They do note the thickness of ginger hair though - the ginger-fro. So there's this sense that people are picking up on something that they can't quite put their finger on.
I've mentioned before the relatively high pheomelanin that redheads have, and how dark-haired people likewise possess this high pheomelanin - it's just masked by the high eumelanin that redheads lack. And that a good illustration of this comes when dark-haired people try to bleach their hair blonde only to end up with hair of an orangey-amber shade. As the bleach destroys the eumelanin more readily than it destroys the pheomelanin.
Anyway, the mention of the ginger-fro reminded me of the oft-repeated claim that redheads have fewer hair follicles on the head.
According to the Google search AI overview (yes, we're in the age of AI now), blondes have around 150,000 hair follicles; brunettes 110,000; black-haired 100,000; and redheads 90,000.
(My lazy AI search result)
That difference between blondes and redheads is really quite staggering, if accurate, and worthy of more investigation. Especially given how fair-skinned both groups are. Though blond hair does seem to be an outlier in general when compared to all groups.
I also (again, lazily) tried to find out how many hair follicles people of African descent have. The answer was 50,000 to 100,000.
Note that this AI overview gives a slightly lower figure of 86,000 for redheads. It also flips the figures for brunette and black hair around. Showing how unreliable these quick AI overviews can be.
I need to do a bit more digging.
