Good old gingers, with their hair, and their…hair. Lovely orange mops, beautiful, strawberry locks, flowing in the wind, sexy gingers, ravishing redheads - gotta love ‘em. But now you have even more reason to love them, because if you don’t, then you’re gonna have a hard time fighting them. Reason being: they feel no pain.
Or at least, less pain than us normal-haired bozos. A new book, The Big Redhead Book: Inside the Secret Society of Red Hair has revealed a number of wonderful facts about our ginge cousins, and how they’re a clearly the superior form of human being.
The book’s author, Erin La Rosa, says: “It’s hard to know what to believe anymore. Our eyes aren’t naturally drawn to the fiery embrace of red hair, and yet society gives us mixed messages about what it means to be ginger (some good, some less so).
“Think about it: We’re rare (only two percent of the world’s population), we’re beautiful (hello, Jessica Chastain), and have the ability to fly (see any of the Weasley family in Harry Potter).”
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Her book dives into the ‘science’ behind it all, too. It’s essentially down to a mutation on the gene MC1R (the one that provides the hair colour), that gives gingers superpowers, in a sense. For example, research at McGill University found in 2003 that ginger women could tolerate up to 25% more pain than the normos.
Subsequent research at The University of Louisville also discovered that it takes 20% more anaesthetic to knock a ginger out - the pattern stretching to novocaine, a redhead needing up to two more shots than a non-orange-hair-haver.
This magical gene from space also means that gingers need less vitamin D, because they create more of it in a shorter time - not having enough vit D can lead to ‘bad things’ like rickets, diabetes or arthritis. So the orange ones have less chance of picking up these conditions, the lucky biscuits.
On the less-fortunate end of the spectrum, their variation of the MC1R also means that they feel temperature extremes more obviously than the rest of us oblivious automatons. This is because the gene may overactivate the human temperature-detecting gene, so when it’s cold, they’re freezing, and when it’s hot, they’re melting.
So what can we glean from this information? Well, if you’re a ginger, then you are a super-powered mutant warrior from another dimension that never sleeps and doesn’t feel pain, but is always cold; and if you’re not, then you are inferior and must bow down to the orange gods. It’s all pretty simple.
(Images: Rex)
