On Being Ginger

"Only a ginger can call another ginger 'ginger.'"

About the Author: Alexandra Naughton is a San Francisco-based blogger, writer, rapper and zine publisher. She has a passion for photography, art, poetry, and finding beauty in the everyday. To join her adventure, read her blog (We highly recommend it!) and follow her on Twitter.

I used to hate being a ginger. Like Anne Shirley, of Anne of Green Gables, I couldn’t stand my red hair and freckled face. I didn’t look like the other kids– my mom had cut my hair short, which made my red locks spring up into tight little curls– and in my early school years I resented feeling like an outcast. I wanted to be like the other little girls with their mousy brown hair which their mothers let them grow long below their bottoms. I got teased for looking different and I didn’t feel pretty. When you’re older it’s cool to be different, but when you’re in kindergarten it is far easier when you are assimilated.

Not all of the attention I got from my gingerness was negative when I was a child. In fact, my elderly Italian neighbors would fawn over me, calling me “Shirley Temple,” and telling me they would die (or was it “dye?”) to have my hair color. These compliments gave me a self esteem boost, but were also a bit confusing. Why would anyone want to have red hair? Why would anyone want to look like me?

I didn’t express my contempt for my looks to anyone else, I heard enough of that from my classmates. I envisioned starting my own girl group, a la The Supremes, called The Sun Spots with me as the lead singer. The other girls in the group would also have freckles, hence the name “sun spots.” I wanted to like my freckles and red hair and dreaming up positive outcomes from my sorry situation did make me feel better, but I was still intensely worried that no one, besides my family, would ever love me. That’s quite a burden to carry for a six year old…

The red-haired characters I saw on television were almost always socially inept bespectacled dweebs, so I related to their plight. There were some exceptions to the Gingers Must Be Ugly & Unpopular Rule, like Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but those were rare fish in a sea of trout. One character that served as an inspiration to my young ginger self was Madeline, the red-haired French girl with a tummy scar and an adventurous spirit. She didn’t care what anyone else thought– she knew what she liked and she went after her dreams.

I was an awkward adolescent, but being ginger made me stick out like a sore thumb amongst my peers. However, after being teased for many years for just about anything I did – from the clothes I wore to the music I liked to the books I read to  the thing I had no control over, my physical appearance, I eventually got used to it. I suppose you can only be teased so much until it just becomes normal, and finally I decided somewhere in the fourth or fifth grades that I didn’t want to be like everyone else. I wanted to be different, to be weird, and so I embraced my gingerness.

Always the contrarian, I took extra steps to get away from the group, like the time in summer camp when I took to saying “present” during roll call instead of “here” like the rest of the campers, until that one day when one of the more nasty counselors thought it would be hilarious to single me out and got the rest of the camp to say “present” forcing me to say “here.” They got a good laugh out of that, but you know what they say, “Small joke, small brain” (yes, I borrowed that from Full House).

So, I learned to love what set me apart from other people, my ugly duckling status, so to speak, became an asset. In high-school and college I really became comfortable with myself and didn’t let other people’s negativity get me down. I liked what I saw in the mirror and realized that I could find friends who appreciated me for being me. I also realized that the reason people picked on me had more to do with the bully than it had to do with me. Being ginger just made me seem like an easy target because I was “the other.”

There are a lot of cool things about being ginger. For one, Mark Twain has said that redheads are special because we descended from cats, unlike the rest of the human race which descended from apes, and who doesn’t love cats? Cats are way cuter than monkeys. And even though studies have shown that we are more sensitive to pain, and I don’t need a scientific study to show that we do not tan and shouldn’t stay out in the sun too long, we are very easy to spot in a large crowd of people. I once had a colorblind person tell me that my hair was unlike anyone else’s – that it looked like “magic.” That’s the only way he could describe it.

All in all, I like being a ginger. Fewer than one percent of the world population has red hair and that makes me feel unique. If there is any life lesson you take away from this article, be it this: rock who you are, love who you are. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says, be real with yourself and feel good about what makes you an individual. Why would you ever want to be just like anyone else when you can be an original you? Those are my words of wisdom that I hope resonate with readers.

Before I go, though, also remember this:

“Only a ginger can call another ginger ‘ginger.’”