History of Hair Colour

Over 90% of the world’s people have naturally dark hair. While black and dark hair dominate, the variety of tones and combinations of skin and eye colours vary according to different gene groups.

Kashmiri and Irish people with dark hair and blue eyes share similar features passed down from Neolithic Indo-Europeans, whilst the dark hair of Native Americans descends from Asian peoples who reached America via Alaska. Red hair seems to have started to appear some 35,000 years ago, the result, it is thought, of a mutated pigment gene. Truly blonde hair is a more recent development, only appearing in the last few thousand years! In Ancient Rome.

Of course thanks to technological advances, especially in the past fifty years or so, we can now change or enhance our hair colour almost any way we want. Click on our timeline to see how hair colour has influenced our lives in the past 150 years