Red Hair

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

8/10 confidence.

About Red Hair

MC1R is a receptor on pigment cells that switches production between dark eumelanin and red-yellow pheomelanin. When both copies of the receptor are impaired, the switch stays on the red-yellow setting, which produces red hair and skin that burns rather than tans. No single change accounts for this: a handful of high-penetrance variants each break the receptor, and red hair usually requires two of them in any combination. That is why reading one position cannot answer the question, and why red hair can appear in a family with no red-haired parent.

Good to know: Red hair generally needs two impaired copies, and they need not be the same variant. One copy commonly means fairer skin and freckling rather than red hair. MC1R carries further rare changes beyond the five read here.

Fun fact: Only about 1-2% of people worldwide have red hair, making it the rarest natural hair color.

Discovery: MC1R was tied to red hair and fair skin in the mid-1990s.

The Variants

The 5 positions this trait reads

Gene: MC1R

rs1805006 Asp84Glu (D84E) - high-penetrance "R" variant

rs11547464 Arg142His (R142H) - high-penetrance "R" variant

rs1805007 Arg151Cys (R151C) - high-penetrance "R" variant

rs1805008 Arg160Trp (R160W) - high-penetrance "R" variant

rs1805009 Asp294His (D294H) - high-penetrance "R" variant

Location: Chr 16:89,919,709

dbSNP rs1805007

The studies

Melanocortin 1 receptor variants in an Irish population (Smith R et al., The Journal of investigative dermatology, 1998)

A study in scarlet: MC1R as the main predictor of red hair and exemplar of the flip-flop effect (Zorina-Lichtenwalter K et al., Human molecular genetics, 2019)

Novel MC1R variants cause red hair and lighter skin color (Kashyap DK et al., HGG advances, 2026)

Genetic diversity of the melanocortin-1 receptor in an admixed population of Rio de Janeiro: Structural and functional impacts of Cys35Tyr variant (Neitzke-Montinelli V et al., PloS one, 2022)

Other lifestyle traits

Eye Shape and Focus: A variant that nudges how long the eyeball grows, which is what decides whether distant or near objects fall into focus.

Burns or Tans: Three pigment genes that together set whether your skin answers sunlight by tanning or by burning.

Age Spots: A change in the promoter of the telomerase gene, linked to how many flat brown sun spots appear on skin over the years.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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