Blond Hair

Your result, the one DNA position behind it, and what the research says.

10/10 confidence.

About Blond Hair

Hair color is settled by many positions acting together, and this card reads one of the best-studied of them. It sits in a stretch of regulatory DNA hundreds of thousands of letters away from the gene it controls, and it weakens a pigment signal specifically in hair follicles rather than anywhere else in the body. That is why it moves hair color without moving skin or eye color with it. The other pigment genes this site reads sit on their own cards, and the shade someone actually has is all of them together.

Good to know: The switch sits hundreds of thousands of letters from the gene it controls. It acts in hair follicles specifically, which is why it moves hair and not skin or eyes. Many other genes contribute, so this shifts the odds rather than deciding the shade.

Fun fact: Stickleback fish carry a separate regulatory change at the same gene, which lowers Kit ligand in the gills and the belly and leaves both pale.

Discovery: The blond hair effect of this regulatory region was pinned down in 2014.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: KITLG

Variant (rsID): rs12821256

Location: Chr 12:88,934,558

dbSNP rs12821256

The studies

A molecular basis for classic blond hair color in Europeans (Guenther CA et al., Nature genetics, 2014)

Other lifestyle traits

Eye Color: The biggest genetic switch for blue against brown eyes, read together with two changes that decide the shade it lands on.

Hair Curl: A variant near the trichohyalin gene, which shapes the hair follicle root and is the main driver of straight versus wavy hair in people of European descent.

Hair Thickness: A change in a developmental gene that thickens individual hair strands and makes them straighter, alongside a distinctive scooped shape to the front teeth.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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