(ORDO NEWS) — Have you noticed that some men have a different color of beard and hair on their heads? Or maybe you are the same man? We tell you what underlies this physiological phenomenon.
When a baby begins to develop in the womb, all the hair on his head is white. And only as melanin accumulates in the body, the hair acquires its natural color: from jet black to blond.
At the same time, two pigments affect the shades of the hair: pheomelanin (gives the hair red and yellow pigment) and eumelanin (brown and black pigment). Like paint on a palette, different pigments can mix in the hair follicles, giving the hair its unique color.
However, it is not at all necessary that the same combinations will be present in all hair follicles. Therefore, in some men, the color of the beard is different from the color of the hair on the head – for example, there are such combinations: blond hair and a dark brown beard or brown hair and a red beard.
By the way, the latter case is quite common and raises questions – how can a red-haired man not have a red beard? In fact, the MC1R gene is responsible for this interesting combination, which gives the hair a red tint.
If a child inherits this gene from both parents, his body hair will be red. But if you only inherit MC1R from one parent, it can only affect a subset of your follicles, and that’s how you get a red beard.
Interesting beard fact
In the middle of the 19th century, Norwegian-American Hans Langseth decided to grow a beard in order to take part in the competition.
At that time, the young man was 19 years old. It is not known whether young Hans became the winner of the competition, but he decided not to cut his beard – he grew it all his life until he cut off most of it in old age.
Hans died at the age of 81, and from the age of 19 his beard grew to 5.33 meters! At the same time, it is surprising that at different periods of his life Langseth’s beard differed in color – in youth and maturity it was chestnut, and when the man began to age, the hair in his beard turned yellow.
Now the five-meter beard of Hans Langseth is kept at the Smithsonian Institution (USA).
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