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The answer is in the genes
Especially now that the beard is back in fashion, it is more and more common to meet men who do not have red hair on their heads, but have a red beard. But why is that?
The friend, the brother, the buddy, or maybe the guy who noticed you at the traffic light yesterday: Any one of them will certainly wear a beard. Have you ever looked more closely? Do you hide some red hair that you did not expect due to the man's brown, black or blond hair color? Here you can read how this phenomenon can happen.
Our hair color is not defined by a single gene, but by the interaction of several different genes. Decisive for the ultimate hair color is the respective amount of the pigments eumelanin and phomelanin from which are contained in the fiber layer of the hair. If the pigment eumelanin predominates, the hair tends to be darker. A larger amount of phenomelanin results in a blonde to red coloration. The amounts of the two melanins are stored in our DNA.
As the specialists Petra Haak-Bloem explains in an interview with Motherboard, researchers discovered a decade ago that the gene MC1R plays a special role in people with red hair. This is responsible for the conversion of phenomalanine into eumelanin. If two mutations of the MC1R gene are inherited, more phoenomelanin is produced than eumelanin. The person then has red hair and fair skin.
The combination of a red beard and a different hair color can result from inheriting only one mutant MC1R gene. Then the red hair does not necessarily have to show on the head, can also be seen only when man leaves a beard. Since we can inherit the genes for our hair color not only from our parents, but also from distant ancestors, it may well be that the red-beard phenomenon can show in a man, although his brother and his father have no red whiskers to have.
