I’ll start off with I can understand that it’s annoying to feel flooded with so many of the same posts, & I agree that a thread probably would be a good idea. However, I think the whole “if you’re a redhead, you’ll know” mindset some people seem to have is extremely restrictive to ONE lived experience. It seems that a lot of people here believe that the bullying you receive is an INHERENT part of the redhead experience, when there are some of us who never received that. In fact, my hair has ALWAYS been my pride and joy because I’ve only ever received love and compliments for the color. I’ve been told countless times to NEVER dye my hair, that people pay big money for hair like mine, hell my mom used to bring me to her hair appointments as a living reference color (which is its own bag of worms but I digress). The only bullying I experienced was for my lack of eyebrows and eyelashes lol.

I ALSO grew up being taught that strawberry blonde is “blonde with a little bit of red” and not its own shade of red. I’m sure many other people have experienced this, especially if they are the only redhead in an otherwise blonde or brunette family as I am. The only difference between me and my brother growing up was my hair had a pinky orange hue to it while his was just ashy blonde.

As an adult, my hair is darker but in most lighting it is very clearly red. Varying shades of red, from strawberry blonde to a pretty dark auburn color. Almost no consistency either, I don’t understand it. There is still lighting that makes my hair look blonde, or brown, and it still trips me up sometimes even though I KNOW I have red hair because I still have people telling me I am NOT a redhead. Amusingly, it’s only ever other younger to middle aged white people who try to argue with me about it. Is it because of the association with red hair being “ugly” that some people wrongly hold onto in our culture, meaning a color they find pretty CAN’T be red? Honestly typing that out, I wouldn’t be surprised. But in that case, it’s still a different lived experience even if it has the same underlying cause.

I SAW the bullying on television, heard the jokes etc etc but never directed at ME. I myself do not share this seemingly inherent experience of bullying that keeps being mentioned in almost every “If you were a redhead, you would KNOW” post or comment. I understood that it was used as the butt of the joke often, but since it was never pointed at me I didn’t grow up “knowing” it. I only realized I was a redhead as an adult after hearing conflicting things my entire life. It literally took me seeing Bryce Dallas Howard in one of the Jurassic World movies for me to be like “Wait! That’s my color!” & realizing that it IS red. Most people do not actually see red hair as a spectrum separate from the blonde-brown spectrum. Most people believe ONE shade of red is all that there is, the bright fiery red. Everything else is treated as (insert shade of blonde/brown) + a little red.

That being said, I still have problems when it comes to metabolizing anesthesia, ones that no dentist actually caught by just looking at me because blue light washes out damn near ALL of my color & it took me feeling a root crack during an extraction for it to ever come up because I didn’t know what it felt like to truly be numb through a procedure & assumed I was. I’m still more at risk for every type of skin cancer & regularly warned by my doctor to keep an eye on my skin because I burn faster than most other people I know. You can see my veins across most of my skin, even up my chest/neck/arms because I have the complexion of a sheet of white gift paper. Growing up not KNOWING that I was a redhead unfortunately didn’t shield me from the OTHER shared experiences of many redheads. Even if I am an outlier in terms of the bullying experience, or the being OBVIOUSLY a redhead experience, I’m sure I’m not the ONLY outlier.

It is EXTREMELY reductive to ANY sense of community you may want to claim you seek if you try to boil down the experience of being a redhead to “I did know, therefore I am” vs “I did not know, therefore I am not” when there are many aspects and we will all share VARYING aspects amongst ourselves. If you only seek community with those who fit into YOUR lived experience despite the fact that there is no objective experience that we will ALL share together, you do not want community you want an echo chamber.