Hair colour and Asperger's

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As much as 90% of the world's population has brown hair.

Statistically speaking, it is only a coincidence that most aspies would have brown hair too.

I used to have very bright ginger hair. Then after I gained weight it started going darker and darker. Some say it's brown but when I'm out in the sun it's a very dark red. I still have a ginger patch under the fall of my hair on the right side. My hairdresser has never seen anything like it before.

My mum was a redhead but it has now faded into a champagne colour.
My dad had black hair, now grey.
My two older sisters have red hair.
My twin has dark brown hair.

I'm the only autistic in my family.

I have known multiple people with ASD and red hair, but I didn't realize the correlation.

My hair is blondish brown

The poll seems to disprove the contention that there is a correlation between red hair and autism. But if you think that...think again.

Most of the world is black haired, or brown haired. Japan, China, India, sub-Saharan Africa, don't have many natural redheads, or blondes.

WP is a global autism site, but is skewed in membership towards the first world, and towards the English speaking world. So its to be expected that you would have a higher than world average of light haired folks. But still...


According to the stats I just googled only less than two percent of the world population is red haired. The US is, oddly enough about the same percentage. One to two percent.

The US, with a large White population, but also with large populations of other races, is probably a similar racial mix to Wrongplanet ( ie diverse, but somewhat skewed to those of European ancestry, and not quite representative of the world).

The Celtic fringe of Europe has the biggest proportion of redheads. Scotland with six percent, and Ireland with ten percent.

The population of WP, at 12 percent red head (according the poll, as of this writing)If accurate then that means that Wrongplanet has a higher percentage of red heads than does the nation of Ireland!

That does make me wonder if there isn't a correlation between red hair and autism.

That conjured up a wonderful image, given the context. I guess the Italian and Iberian peninsulas are the "Latin bangs of Europe" then?

I ticked brown, but it depends which part of me you look at. The hair on top of my head was blonde for the first four or five years of my life, but then turned brown. My beard and some of my erm... "other" hair, however, was red (my Dad was a red-beard, too). The once-red parts are nearly all grey now, but the brown on top of my head is still hanging in there.

My hair is more brown than anything else, but there are also a significant number of blonde hairs, making the brown appear lighter than it actually is. If the sun hits it right, there's even a glint of red. Diagnosed AS.

My NT brother has strawberry blond hair.

you're like a calico cat.

"Fringe" was not an intended pun.

But if you wanna run with it then... the modern descendants of the Vikings who settled Greenland, Iceland, the Shetlands, and the Faroes, would be the far flung "the Nordic split ends of Europe"!

There are some differences in how the genetics work, but not that far off.

Some of the fur color genes for cats are carried by the X-chromosome, which females have two of. If one codes for white-fur, and the other for tortoiseshell, different parts of the cat can come out differently depending which X-chromosome the gene is expressed from. Hence calico toms are so rare, as they have only one X-chromosome.

The human red-hair gene is a regular recessive one, so requires a copy from both parents for the child to be a red-head. However, the other hair-colour genes are only partially dominant; so if you have only a single copy of the red-hair gene, it can still get expressed sometimes for certain kinds of hairs where the conditions are right (similarly, dark-haired people may have blonde eyebrows, etc.). In single-copy "carrier" families, it can skip several generations without showing itself, but it means that you had red-headed ancestors somewhere down the line.

I think the color genes for calico and tortoiseshell require two X chromosomes, so a calico or tortoiseshell male has to have a duplicate X chromosome (XXY instead of XY). That's why calico/tortoiseshell males are so much more rare than ginger females (the ginger gene being a recessive X chromosome trait).

^ Thanks; that makes sense - a kind of Kitty Kinnefelter Syndrome in effect.

light brown/dark blonde hair
didnt know whether to choose blonde or brown but chose brown

I have brown hair on my head, but my beard is a ginger/auburn colour.

the darkest of dark brown which appears black at any distance, but gray beard

1. Autism is seems to be more or less equally distributed among all ethnic groups.
2. The vast majority of people from places other than northern Europe have black or dark brown hair.
3. Therefore, unless it were established that people of northern European ancestry are more likely to be autistic, there is probably not a strong correlation between autism and hair color.

I'm from the planet of Hebezeka and a few of us have naturally blue hair. Obviously we can't go around with blue hair without looking like nuts so we usually dye it black or brown.

i'm from the planet Halarge in a different dimension with different physical laws so my natural hair color is not to be comprehended by earth creatures. so i dye it the darkest of dark brown, almost black.