The growing epidemic of Hipsterdom started in late 2010.
While doctors believed they quarantined the strain, they failed to realize they it had gone viral. Rather than simply being transmitted through sight and touch, Hipsterdom could now be spread through social media interaction. Like an airborne virus, the disease spread from hand to face(book). Twitter was no longer safe and Instagram was especially a breeding ground for the plague.
In record numbers, we began seeing ironic t-shirts, fedoras, and handlebar mustaches, a staple of having caught the Hipster.
As the viral trend spread, we collectively noticed something about the way it shone through the genes. It mutated from simply being a mustache trend, to growing into an entire beard. As it progressed, we saw that the affected men (and even a few who un-ironically liked facial hair), were marked with a plague of another sort: gingerness.
These men were not full-blown gingers. While they still had souls, their beards clearly did not. Why had such a brunette gent been marked with a ginger beard?
A blogger on Motherboard contacted some genetics experts at Erfocentrum in Holland to find out the answer.
Scientist Petra Haak-Bloem explained it was down to a gene we all have called MC1R.
Hair color is complex (not like your inferiority complex, think more along the lines of Gregor Mendel). Unlike other traits there is not one dominant gene that influences how we look.
Therefore, there is not a single gene that control hair color AND beard color. It means that hair on different parts of the body can be a range of different colors.
Petra explains: “When someone inherits two mutated versions of the MC1R-gene (one from each parent), less pheomelanine is converted into eumelanine. The [pheomelanine] accumulates in the pigment cells and the person ends up with red hair and fair skin.”
So next time you meet a ginger at a bar, try explaining this one to them. (Just make sure you aren’t too drunk to pronounce those big words.)
[Featured Image Credit: News.au]