Apparently a reason to follow me on Twitter. A reason to ask me if the carpet matches the curtains. A reason to touch my hair while I walk passed you in the street. A reason to call me the spawn of the devil. A reason to fear me for my fiery temper.
Do all redheads have a fiery temper?
Well, I don’t know… I know this might sound really bizarre but just because I have red hair, it doesn’t mean that I’m psychically linked to all red-haired people on this planet. We’re not Borg, but right now I’m very tempted to assimilate you…
What do you think that redhead in the painting featured at the top of this post – The Accolade by Edmund Blair Leighton – is actually doing.
Is she tapping some guy on the shoulder to let him know that he did a good job?
Is she about to lop off his head because he’s been a very bad boy?
Or maybe she’s just using his tunic to clean some blood and guts, which he’s very relieved aren’t his, off of her shiny pointy stick?
She looks quite peaceful to me, but… it could be the calm before the storm, or the eerie silence after the storm.
“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition
If you’re truly interested in conducting a scientific study to test this theory about the temperament of the red of hair out, might I suggest that you start off by dying your own hair red and seeing what happens.
You look terrified by such a simple and logical suggestion. Are you afraid that all those demons inside of you, which you so carefully hide with your fun-loving blonde…
or are you really a serious brunette under the blonde smile?
…will take the colour change as their cue to come bursting out, flowing forth freely in the motion of big emotions which you seem hell bent not to feel.
Ah, the very human kind of demons hidden within very human humans. But they’re not hidden well now are they?
The slightest dent to the ego, and the pleasant smile turns into an unpleasant snarl.
The merest skip of a pebble on the placid surface, and ripples ripple, soon becoming waves.
The lightest tread on the manicured lawn… well, yes, there was a sign: Do NOT step on the grass… but no one heeds the warning because it is never for them it is for those stupid others who are definitely not them, and the sea of green was so inviting, trespassers never think they are one of those even when they get shot.
“If you’re betwixt and between, trust the one with red hair.”
― O.R. Melling, The Hunter’s Moon
You’d think that all the sunshine shining out of the asserting assembly of good people of this world would chase the shadows away, but it only serves to make them more noticeable. Perhaps an eclipse would be more useful for not allowing to be seen what longs deep inside to be noticed and heard which is why it screams.
Every effort made to get rid of the bugs which bug, prod, poke, bite, nip… only seems to make them swarm.
How do you banish the need, greed, fear, fury, shame, guilt, gory… perhaps by finding a red and blaming her instead.
“Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!
I wouldn’t have followed you on Twitter if you didn’t have red hair. I would never have asked you if the carpet matched the drapes if you didn’t have red hair. I wouldn’t have touched your hair as you passed by in the street if you didn’t have red hair.
I wouldn’t have called you the spawn of the devil if you didn’t have red hair… because that would have been silly as only redheads have that historical reputation.
And I wouldn’t fear your fiery temper if you didn’t have red hair… and yet here I am saying this to you which perhaps I shouldn’t because of your red-tempered hair.
“All the kick-ass girls have red hair.”
― Marion Roach, Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair
So, I took my own advice and went off on an adventure to find a way not to cause so much trouble for others due to their interpretations of my hair.
I bleached it to bits and that did not go as planned, the red turned to pink… just think of how the poor people would be affected by that!
Brown seemed a safer way to go… but made it so much harder to go anywhere along busy streets. Bump, bump, bumpity-bump. Did this colour come with a force field which forced people to bump into me!? This had never happened before, before the way before me parted when I was red.
Black it must be… but the raven-haired lock look looked ridiculous on me!
“You’d find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair,” said Anne reproachfully. “People who haven’t red hair don’t know what trouble is.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
And thus I returned to my roots.
Denial was not an option, it had been tried and tested. Depression was far worse when covered by the false and fake. Acceptance was required, and with it came the chance to embrace my license to anger. Bargaining would have to wait while I took stock and restocked the chamber of my natural weapon.
As I sit here writing this, a wisp of white appears… hmmm… new lands await to be explored, but for now let’s end this.
That’s it from me…
Over to you.
This post is inspired by Kira’s Sunday Scribbles for Word of the Day Challenge
An Upturned Soul 
Thats AWESOME, I always had a love for red heads! It’s something so “commonly unique” (oxymoron, I know 🤓), chic, and timeless. You can tousle it for fun loving, s-wave it for night time allure, straighten it for boho, siggghh, you are blessed!
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Thank you very much, Scherezade 🙂
Haha! Redheads come in a straight-haired version too. I used to gaze longingly at the curly, but my hair holds a curl for about five seconds and then it says nopity-nope to that and I end up looking like I fell through a bush backwards 😉
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You mean you don’t eat the souls of your enemies for breakfast? I am disappointed.
I actually dyed my hair from blonde to red for about twenty years in part to escape the god-awful blonde jokes were prevalent at the time and for some reason, people insisted on telling me. >_< ^_^ After my thyroid quit on me and my hair started falling out, it wasn't feasible to stress my hair, so it's back to dirty blonde.
But I hear ya… when people realize my sister and I are identical twins, they often take all kinds of liberties they normally wouldn't take.
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Haha! The souls of my enemies are rather nice to nibble upon at breakfast, they’re like melba toast 🙂
The great thing about living in the human world is there’s something annoying and ridiculous for everyone in every kind of way. It’s a right of passage to do it and to have it done to us. We’re such curious creations!
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Er…carpet matches the drapes? Wow. And touching your hair because it’s ‘red’? Ew. Some people have no boundaries. And you’ve explained, in part, why my mother had such a temper..her hair wasn’t ‘red’ exactly, no it was that deep auburn brown (brown with red undertones and highlights). Also why people were a little afraid of her. Me? I’ve always been blonde. Of one sort or another, but I stuck with my blondness even through the 80s when being blonde labeled a girl as ‘stupid, feckless, and a total moron.” The jokes were awful. Now? I embrace my winter white with enthusiasm. I’ve never been ‘red’, I don’t think I have the temperament for it actually. I always admired the reds though, admired them deeply.
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Thank you, Melanie 🙂
I think sometimes it’s that thing about having to touch something to believe it and to satisfy curiosity about a curiosity. One time I was sitting watching a film and suddenly the person sitting next to me stroked my arm. The person was a little girl and she’d never seen freckled skin before, so she felt compelled to touch it. She did apologise and explain. It was weird and funny.
The stereotype jokes are mind-numbingly awful for the most part when it doesn’t really matter, and truly shocking when it does matter. Listening to comedians from the 60’s and 70’s can be a head-banging experience in just how terrible humans can be about other humans and think that it’s okay because ‘they were only joking’.
Occasionally someone will come up with one which is new and different, I particularly like the ones which add a clever spin that turns things around on those who tell the old and tiresome jokes, and gives the person who is the target of the joke power.
I’m looking forward to being all white, atm I’ve got a bit of bride of Frankenstein white streaks in the red which are fun to have 😉
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The funny thing about blonde jokes is when I retaliated by telling “brunette” jokes (What do you call a beautiful brunette? A rottweiler) or “men” jokes (Why are all blonde jokes one liners? So men can remember them) people would get offended. Strange how that works, isn’t it?
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It’s a mystery 😉
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Fantastic. I admire people with red hair. In the UK they use the term Ginger for people with red hair and that’s usually derogatory, which is totally stupid. I think it must stem from a feeling of inadequacy that people have to try to diminish others.
I think the beautiful lady in the picture is Knighting the man in front of her, but of course, she may suddenly change her mind and then ‘off with his head’. They were troublesome times after all. 🙂
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Thank you very much, Kristian 🙂
I live in the UK too, where our true king is Prince Harry (aka Prince Hot Ginge), and our queen is Catherine Tate whose Ginger Hair Safe House has offered many of us refuge 😉
From the intensive research which the scientists who study such things (who may also be the same scientists who studied the speed of Ketchup coming out of ye olde glass bottle) have not done, it has been inconclusively concluded that the fear of Ginger which has lead to the taunting of redheads may be linked to The Picts (who may have had red hair or dyed it red for fashionable reasons perhaps) and the impression they left of being enigmatic savages.
Luckily for all of us those troublesome times are behind us and we all live together in a yellow submarine 😀
Humans are weird… sometimes it’s a fun kind of weird.
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Haha, I just assume now that eveyone on WP is in the States 😉 Yes, Weird can be good. For me it just can’t be helped.
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Lots of redheads in my family. My grandmother, uncles, one of my sisters, my brother. My hair was quite red when I was born but darkened to a sort of reddish-brown (now it’s an indiscrimate greyish something). My sister got a lot of comments about being bad luck, having a temper, being bad (it seems that redheaded women have been treated worse than redheaded men, natch). She really internalised it, too – she was quite affected (I’ve wondered if that’s part of the reason why she was my mom’s golden child).
I have always liked red hair though. So pretty. My grandmother’s was really beautiful.
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Thank you, Lynette 🙂
I have always thought that redheaded males have it worse than redheaded females when it comes to the way they’re treated by non-redheads. Since with females once you become a woman, the red hair often becomes an admired feature, whereas men seem to get targeted for teasing for their red hair as adults too.
It just struck me that I never once got any attention for having red hair in Italy. There are redheaded Italians, but it’s rare, and the Italians do tend to love pointing things out about people, especially anything which makes them different, and poking them about it. Also what’s weird is that there is so much Ginger hate in the UK where red hair is common.
My mother hated my red hair when I was little because of it being ‘pink’, but as I grew up and it got darker she became very possessive about it and would regularly lecture me about what I could and couldn’t do with it. She ordered me never to touch the colour – which is probably why I went crazy messing with the colour the moment I went NC 😉 Her hair was what is sometimes called strawberry-blonde, it was more blonde than red.
The golden child is usually chosen to live out the N’s unlived life, to be everything the N wants to be, to pursue the N’s dreams, ambitions, and fulfill their wishes for them. It’s often the eldest who gets the role because they’re the first child – first come first served, although it can shift to another child if more are born. My dad’s mother shifted her focus onto her second born and made him the golden child, her reason for doing that was apparently because my dad, the first born, was her favourite and she didn’t want any more children, so she felt guilty and decided to punish my dad for being her favourite and rewarding his younger brother for being the one she didn’t want. It’s so twisted, and so it’s not always obvious how the roles get handed out.
Reddish-brown is incredibly beautiful! Grey hair if left to be natural is mysterious and dignified – these days with so much fear of signs of aging, anyone who lets the natural stand as is is a force to be reckoned with 🙂
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Thank you. 🙂 The one thing I don’t like is that with my fair skin, my face sort of just melts into my hair. Kind of alarming. I’m getting used to it though. 🙂
Teasing of red-headed males seems to be a UK thing (or so it appears to me over here). That seems really odd because isn’t Harry quite the heartthrob? Yes, the UK does seem to be picking on quite a chunk of its population …
“Pink”? Was that just your mother’s description or was your red hair that light? I’ve never heard of pink red hair before. Of course you coloured it – a visible manifestation of your independence. I would have done the same. 🙂
The narcissist has such a screwed idea of what parenting is. My red-headed sister is the oldest. My mother really tried to pump her up, especially at the expense of my other sister who was only a year younger.
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If you bleach red hair it goes a sort of peachy pink colour rather than platinum yellowy, as a baby I had peachy pink fuzz on my head. Most of the baby photos had my head covered in a hat, but I did see one without hat and I did look a bit like a peach 😉
Prince Hot Ginge has done quite a bit for the cause of redheaded males, but old habits die hard.
Then it’s because your sister was first born. Second born often becomes the scapegoat by default. The scapegoat is needed to keep the golden child trapped in their role. And never the twain shall meet or they might overthrow the N parent. You were the wild card, and you did the wild proud! You got out of there ASAP!
I’m sure you’re very beautiful, but it’s not easy to see ourselves as we look externally because we know too much about the internal 😉
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