Question: My name is () and my question is how do people get different coloured hair like blond, black and why is there less red than any other

What a great question! First of all you need to understamd what gives hair its colour. Hair color is determined by the amount of two pigments called eumelanin and phomelanin that are in your hair. The amount of eumelanin in your hair gives you a range from blonde to black—a little eumelanin and you are blonde, an intermediate amount, brown, and a lot, black.

Red comes into the equation with phomelanin. The more phomelanin in your hair, the redder it is.

OK, then, hair color is a mixture of how much eumelanin and phomelanin is in your hair. For example, strawberry blonde is a little of each, auburn is lots of eumelanin and a little phomelanin and a redhead is very little eumelanin and lots of phomelanin.

With eye colour (and many other physical traits) you dont get a mix of each eye colour gene you inherit. instead, some genes are more dominant than others, ie if you have one of them, it will always be the one that ddetermines your eye colour. ie the brown eye colour gene. but recessive (or weaker) genes such as the blue eye gene, require you to get it from both parents for you to have blue eyes.

With hair colour, it’s not about one particular gene, you have many which are either in an off or on possition for producing the pigments, so it’s more like an addition of the genes which are on to determine what colour your hair is, which is why you can end up with a family with very different hair colours!

as for red hair being rare..

Humans usually end up with very little phomelanin because of the product of a gene called MC1R. What MC1R does is cause phomelanin to be changed into eumelanin making red hair pretty rare.