Implausible Hair Color

aka: Implausible Hair Colour

He's not wearing dye, he just has a cool TYRP1 mutation.

Some characters have hair colors, eye colors, skintones, or other colorations that are possible, but very uncommon or rare for the setting. The show is otherwise realistic, but the writers don't want all the characters to have the same hair colors, eye colors, or body colorations.

This trope in regards to human hair colors shows up more in East Asian works, where hair colors other than black or dark brown are rarest. This is by no means limited to that part of the world.

Implausible, but still possible in real life colorations are not reserved for human characters. Some animals of other non-fictional species have rare fur, feather, skin, or scale patterns and colorings. Despite being rare or improbable in real life, these may not be so in fiction. Rule of Cool usually applies here.

Some types of implausible colorations, such as green eyes, red hair, red hair and green eyes, and ivory skintones in humans, and truly white fur with pale or pink skin in horses, are far more common in fiction than in real life. Some overlap with Animal Gender-Bender, like male calico cats, and some overlap with Amazing Technicolor Wildlife, like brown gorillas.

This is especially commonplace in animation, graphical works, print, and text and less common in live-action. In real life, it usually requires finding a rare and expensive animal, or due to how film works, multiple rare and/or expensive animals. In animation, comics, picture books, video games, and literature this might be due to Artistic License – Biology, with the artist not realizing just how rare or improbable the animal coloration is. In other words, this trope is easier to use in animation, graphical works, print, and text, whether

Usually, this is at least a little justified. The character might have foreign parents or mixed ancestry, or dye their hair, or something more interesting (like being a robot). Note though that genetics can be funky. Even a distant ancestor from a foreign country can potentially justify a character having oddly colored hair or eyes (particularly blond or red hair and blue or grey eyes since those are recessive traits). Other conditions like partial albinism can also cause this: potentially giving a character lighter hair and or eyes than is normally possible for their ethnic group. Again, though this is genetic it can potentially skip generations. Other times, the reasons are left to the viewer's imaginations.

This trope sometimes contributes to Informed Species if the implausible coloration takes away from a species hallmark characteristics enough.

When colorations become humanly impossible or impossible in real life, we have World of Technicolor Hair for inhuman hair colors like blue, Amazing Technicolor Population for skin tones and Amazing Technicolor Wildlife for truly impossible colorations in other animal species.

Frequently overlaps with Mukokuseki. May result in a character's hair being Mistaken for Dyed. See Hollywood Genetics when a person has a hair color that is different than their biological family.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ah! My Goddess would fit into plausible hair, except that one of Those Two Guys is blond. Aside from him, all characters in either have black hair or are goddesses or, in a few cases, both. Considering that one guy is the one human who has blond hair, it's pretty close to actual Japanese demographics.
• Akagi Shigeru of Akagi and his body-double Hirayama Yukio both have silvery gray hair, despite being fairly young. No one in the series thinks it's strange at all.
• Chise Hatori of The Ancient Magus' Bride is a Japanese girl with bright red hair and green eyes, which along with her natural magical abilities has led fans to speculate she's not entirely human.
• Angelic Layer has a few blondes here and there amongst the black and brown. (The outrageous hair colours are reserved for the Angels, who are all robots.)
• The manga, TV series, and video game adaptations of Area 88 give Shin blonde hair for no readily apparent reason, even though he's seemingly 100% ethnically Japanese. (Although the 2004 series shows he was raised in a Catholic Church-run orphanage, so some mixed ancestry is not impossible.) Ryoko also has pink hair in the OVA and TV series, while Taeko has red hair in the OVA.
• Azumanga Daioh has Chiyo, who is a Japanese girl with red hair in a series where the majority of the Japanese characters have black or brown hair. Natural Japanese redheads do exist, but they are extremely rare, and no one brings attention to Chiyo's hair color even though it's something the cast should notice as unusual. Then again, she's also a Child Prodigy who started high school at the age of ten, which is also extremely rare.
• Black Butler: Mey-Rin is ostensibly a Chinese woman, but has bright red hair, contrasting other Chinese characters like Lau and Ran-Mao, who both have black hair. At one point, she has to go on an undercover mission with Ran-Mao, where they pretend to be sisters, but no one questions their vastly different hair colours.
• Bleach: About half of the main cast falls under this trope to some degree, a smaller number have completely plausible hair colors, and a few have colors that do not occur anywhere in nature.
  • Orange hair: The manga describes Ichigo's hair as 'honey' and Orihime's as 'caramel'; in the anime, both have an unnaturally bright shade of orange. This is a point of characterization as most people assume that Ichigo is a delinquent who bleaches his hair, and Orihime was bullied as a child because her relatively light hair color made her stick out.
  • Blond hair: Urahara and Kira are both naturally blond. Yuzu's hair color is golden in the manga (a darker mustard shade in the anime). Yukio's is justified on the grounds that he's part-European. Rangiku and Kiyone are blonde-haired in the manga, but red-blonde in the anime. Harribel takes the implausibility the furthest, as a dark-skinned blond.
  • Brown hair: Aizen, Masaki, Keigo, and Starrk all have relatively light brown hair. Chizuru has mahogany brown hair in the manga (unnatural red in the anime). Sado's hair color is justified on the grounds that he's part Mexican. Starrk may also get a pass as it's never really made clear just what race he or any of the other arrancar are supposed to be.
  • White hair unrelated to aging: Gin, lampshaded with his name, meaning silver. Hitsugaya's indicates his elemental powers. Isane and Kensei have silver hair. Ukitake's natural brown hair turned white due to illness in early childhood. In the manga, Ryuuken had white hair even as a child. The anime gives him dark brown hair in flashback, creating a different kind of implausibility (since it implies his hair went completely white in less than 6 years).
• In Brave10, there are three redheads running around: Benmaru, Kamanosuke and Hanzo. Not exactly the most common hair colour in 16th century Japan.
• Rin from Bunny Drop is the only character with blonde hair. Not even her parents have blonde hair. Considering the reveal late in the series that Rin is not biologically Daikichi's grandfather's daughter, it could be considered foreshadowing. She might be biracial.
• Allen Walker of D.Gray-Man has naturally white hair. However, this is justified as it's the result of intense psychological trauma, his original hair color being brown.
• Death Note:
  • Near's hair is snow-white. There's no particular reason to believe he's Japanese, as his real name is the Western-sounding Nate River, but it's not substantially more plausible for a Westerner. Fan theory states that he's albino, which could theoretically make him Japanese.
• Digimon generally has hair colors that naturally occur on humans (except for a few, like purple-haired Miyako), but for a nearly all-Japanese cast, we're talking an inordinately high amount of blond, red, and brown hairstyles:
  • The blonds of Digimon Adventure, Yamato and Takeru, are part-French, and Touma is part-Austrian, so that, at least, is reasonable. The same explanation doesn't seem to be the case for the other blonds present in the series, Yamaki, Izumi, Kiriha, and Yuu (the latter of whom has a brunette sister). Izumi is implied to be at least partially Italian, so presumably one of her parents are from Italy and moved there after Izumi was born.
  • Do Jou, Ken, and Jianliang have black hair stylized to appear as blue, or is it outright dark blue/indigo? We may never know.
  • Let's not forget the Digimon Kaiser and his spiked hair, which is not one but TWO shades of blue! It's somewhat justified as it's the result of his costume in the Digital World which disintegrates upon his Villainous Breakdown, but his real hair is still an obvious indigo, so... The additional shade of blue in the Kaiser's hair was that of his dead brother Osamu, to whose reputation Ken tried to live up at that time. The Digital World is in this season said to render clothes from the Chosen Children's subconsciousness and also created Ken's Kaiser hairstyle as a whole and the wacky sunglasses after Osamu's image, so it's kinda justified in this case.
• Mariko from Elfen Lied has blonde hair in the manga, despite both her parents being Japanese with realistic hair colors. This is partially justified, as Mariko is of a completely different species.
• Eyeshield 21: For all its wackiness, is actually pretty good about hair colors. Most of the cast either has brown or black hair, and those who don't clearly dye their hair (they all have black eye brows). However, there are still a few exceptions in the cast; most notably, Taka's been a white-haired pretty boy since childhood, Agon was light-haired as a child, and Sakuraba's hair ranges from light brown to blonde. Given Sakuraba's status as an idol, it's probable that he was forced to dye it.
• Lampshaded, and even deconstructed, in Fruits Basket. Although some of the Members of the Zodiac have dark brown or black hair, others have hair ranging from red/orange to blonde, and a few of them have grey or white hair (always corresponding to their animal forms). Unlike most manga and anime where no one comments on Japanese characters having unusual hair colors, other characters do notice, with most adults suspecting that they dye their hair. It's even worse with other students—nearly all of the cursed Sohmas with such unusual hair colors (except Momiji, who seems to be able to get away with having blond hair due to being half German) got teased, or even bullied for it, as kids. Most of them were able to get through it relatively unscathed, but poor Kisa was traumatized by it, being bullied by her classmates for having naturally golden hair and eyes. The most hysterical lampshade would probably be when the student council president demands that Hatsuharu shows him physical proof that his black and white hair was his natural hair color...and Hatsuharu complies by dragging him into the nearby bathroom, heavily implying that his "proof" was showing the president his pubic hair.
• Despite being set in Japan and being overall realistic, Gamaran has several characters with unusual hair colors, which includes Gama (greyish-indigo hair Word of God implies got from his Missing Mom), his father Jinsuke (white hair since youth), the Ichinose Clan (bright red hair), Daimaru Sakon (white), Saizo (green), Kiyomori (blonde). The only justified example so far are the members of Rintaro's family, since they're all Dutch or half-dutch, thus their hair color is slightly more justified.
• Mai and Ayako from Ghost Hunt are redheads, while Takigawa has brown hair. (John Brown is Australian and blond.) It is implied, at least in Mai's case, that she dyed her hair.
• Urumi Kanzaki from Great Teacher Onizuka has blond hair and mismatched eyes (one blue and one brown). Justified as her being half-Japanese and half-(white) American. The characters Jun and Kaoru Kamata, and their friend Natsu, from GTO: The Early Years are also blond-haired hafu, though Jun and Natsu are delinquents, for whom dyed hair wouldn't be unusual.
• Shōyō Hinata, the main character of Haikyuu!!, has bright orange hair and stands out amongst the predominantly brunet and raven-haired cast. Unlike other characters in the series his hair seems natural (most likely a stylized medium-tone brown), as his little sister has the same tone.
• Largely subverted in Inuyasha, as nearly all pureblood humans have black hair. Played straight with most youkai and hanyou characters.
• In Knight Hunters, Aya's hair is bright red, and Youji and Omi are both blond. Flashbacks indicate that Aya and Omi's hair colors are most likely natural (and their other family members are all dark-haired). Youji is half-French, although this isn't brought up in the anime itself. Omi remains without an excuse, though.
• Although the artist of Liar Game hasn't actually picked a hair color for Akiyama, he is always drawn with his hair ranging from a light reddish-brown to ginger to gold. Despite being Japanese.
• Everyone in Life (2002) has black hair except for Hatori and Manami, who are blondes. This is never explained but, considering that Hatori is a delinquent and Manami is a fashionable popular girl, they both probably bleached their hair. The Live-Action Adaptation darkens their hair.
• Practically all the main characters of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro have blond or silver hair, although in many (but not all cases), this is to show either that character has criminal connections (dyed blond hair is common in Japanese street gangs) or is not human.
• There are a surprising number of auburn-haired Japanese in Martian Successor Nadesico, but it's otherwise realistic if you consider blue or purple hair to be stylized black, and you remember that Ryoko and Inez are both dye-jobs (and Inez's nationality is pretty vague anyway). Ruri gets a pass for being a Rei expy (see below).
• Atsuko from Michiko & Hatchin is a black woman with a blonde afro. While not impossible it's very rare.
• Midori Days has plausible brown or black for all characters except the leads, blond Seiji and green-headed Midori. However, Seiji having brown hair in flashbacks implies that he dyes it, leaving Midori the only character with an impossible hair colour. Her real body has hair a darker shade of green. (By the way, the Japanese word for green is "midori".) Seiji may be a yankii. Anyway, in many anime, having blond hair for a male Japanese character would be a short cut to saying "This guy here is a delinquent!"
• Mononoke:
  • The Medicine Seller has very pale blond hair in feudal Japan, which, like his Icy Blue Eyes, Facial Markings and Pointy Ears, goes inexplicably unnoticed by those around him.
  • There's also the blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman from the Zashiki Warashi arc, though she gets a shocked reaction out of the innkeeper, suggesting she looks unusual even by the show's standards for a normal human.
• Ōoku: The Inner Chambers: Gosaku can't hide his mixed Dutch-Japanese heritage because he inherited his father's wavy blond hair.
• Pretty Cure:
  • Futari wa Pretty Cure: Rie and Takashi Misumi both have dark brown, almost black hair, but their daughter Nagisa is a redhead.
  • Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star: Like with Nagisa above, Saki has red hair despite having two parents with dark brown hair.
  • Yes! Pretty Cure 5: Like in OHSHC, Urara has blonde hair inherited from her French father, despite blonde hair being very rare among both the Japanese and the French.
  • HeartCatch Pretty Cure!: Yuri inexplicably has purple hair despite having two brunette parents.
  • Suite Pretty Cure ♪: Although red hair is very rare in Japan, Hibiki, her parents, and Ako are all natural redheads.
  • Smile PreCure!:
    • Yayoi has blonde hair despite having two brunette parents.
    • Of the seven Midorikawa kids, only Nao inherits her mother's green hair, while the rest get their father's brown hair. Realistically, there would be more of an even mix between the two.
  • KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode: Like with Suite, Ichika and her mother are both naturally redheaded Japanese women. So are Akira and Miku, but in a more literal sense.
  • HuGtto! Pretty Cure: Like with Urara, Homare is a natural blonde even though the hair colour is very rare in Japan.
  • Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure: In the Amamiya family, blonde Carlos and redheaded Kaeda somehow have two brunette children and no redheaded children.
  • Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure: In the Kasai family, which is nearly entire black-haired, Mitsuki inexplicably has lavender hair.
• Tamaki, Renge, and Honey from Ouran High School Host Club all have blond hair, and the Hitachiin twins are both redheads. Tamaki and Renge are half-French, which is used as kind of a justification seeing as Tamaki inherited his blonde hair from his mother. Except that blonde hair is a recessive trait and naturally blonde hair is very rare in France too.
• Sage/Seiji Date in Ronin Warriors is blond yet explained to be from the prominent Japanese Samurai family of Date Masamune.
• Rurouni Kenshin, the redheaded ronin from 19th century Japan. Though redheads are known to exist naturally in Japan (like this boy), they're still incredibly rare. This is lampshaded in the first episode where one of the characters identifies Kenshin as the Battosai because of his red hair and the scar on his cheek.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Makoto has auburn hair. It specifically gets noted as unusual and makes people worry that she's a Japanese Delinquent.
  • Chibi-Usa has pink hair. Her mother is blonde, her father has black hair. Not only does she have an odd hair colour, but neither of her parents share her hair colour. What has Sailor Moon been up to? Word of God is that her design is supposed to invoke an albino rabbit's. Likewise, in one of the earliest manga designs, Usagi was going to have pink hair herself. Though that decision was scrapped, Chibi-Usa's pink hair remained. Usagi's mother is pink-haired in the manga, so it could be a recessive trait
  • Usagi herself counts for this, since her Earth parents have black hair and blue hair, yet she and her brother are blonds. Shingo in the 1990s anime is a near brunette shade of blond, but Crystal gives him a brighter colour like his sister.
  • This is averted in the live-action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, where the characters have regular Japanese hair colors in their civilian lives and only gain their unusual hair colors when they transform.
• Almost every character in Saiyuki. The ostensibly Chinese characters have a rainbow of hair colors (although at least with the youkai characters they aren't bound by the same physical rules as humans). The Westerner who could plausibly be blond has silver hair despite being 19.
• While the other team members in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman all have brown hair, Jun is the odd one out with long deep green hair. This could be chalked up to Hair Color Dissonance in the original series (as colorists sometimes made it more on the black or brown side), but the sequels and most modern artwork and merchandise make her hair a blatant emerald green shade.
• Lampshaded in Sket Dance in the online dating plot arc, where Himeko and Bossun become e-mail sweethearts without knowing it. Since Himeko told Bossun through e-mail that her hair is dark (and it's otherwise blonde), when they are about to meet each other for the first time, she dyes her hair black to keep the masquerade. When Bossun (not knowing why she is at the meeting place) asks her why she dyed her hair, she answers that it's none of his business and that it's anyway unnatural for a Japanese to have blond hair. Though it should be noted that she is a natural Brunette.
• Soul Eater has a variety of hair colours ranging from the implausible to the impossible. An example of the former would be Maka's hair, in that her mother is suggested to be Japanese and her father has bright red hair (worth noting that the other Japanese women do have black hair). Maka's own hair is more a light brown or blonde.
• Ultra Maniac has a few people with blonde hair. Nina is justified because she's a witch, but on normal people, it's a bit jarring.
• In Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, Hana, her siblings Yanagi and Kiri, and their mother Tsuki all have grey hair. Tsuki is only 43, and looks much younger.
• The Vision of Escaflowne has Hitomi Kanzaki, who has light brown hair and green eyes.
• Early artwork of Yuki's boyfriend in Wandering Son had him with blond hair, while everyone else in the manga has realistic colors (though it could have been bleached considering his personality). The following volumes clear it up by giving him brown hair.
• The characters in X/1999 all have fairly typical black or brown hair, but Kotori and her mother both have inexplicable wavy blonde hair.
• Other than the purple/blue/pink/green-haired characters in Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, we have fair-haired Shiraishi and strawberry blond Rika - in an entirely Japanese setting.
• Three characters (two of them being siblings) in Your Lie in April have blond hair when their parents have dark hair. It's even more noticeable as the rest of the cast has black and brown hairs.
• Most characters in Yuri!!! on Ice have realistic hair colors, and any cases of multi-colored hair are obviously due to hair dye. The exception is Victor Nikiforov, who has silver hair despite being only 27, and flashbacks show that his hair was silver even when he was younger.

Fan Works

• In Chlorine Grown Roses, Azusa's hair is half black and half blond. This is explained as being natural because her mom had black hair and her dad had blond hair, but it doesn't make sense because both of her parents are Japanese. Additionally, her friend Akira—who is also Japanese, presumably—is blond, and the tips of Akira's hair are still burnt from a fire she was involved in ten years ago. According to Azusa, "they would be there, for the rest of her life."
• In Hell Is a Martial Artist Ranma wonders how both Usagi and Minako are natural blondes despite clearly being Japanese; though he does admit he doesn't have room to talk given he's a redhead as a girl.
• The JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fic Is the Line From Me to You has Yoshikage Kira lampshades the fact that he and Koichi Hirose are both blonde despite being Japanese. He even wonders if there had been a population of Europeans that settled Morioh and were never recorded, which would explain why such a rare hair color exists.
• In Kill la Kill AU, we have a six-year old Ragyo's hair, which is blonde. Both of her parents have black hair, however, this is a tad excusable in that Amoridere isn't sure what hair color Ragyo would have had as a child, pre-life fibers, and figured it would have been either black (like Ryuuko and Satsuki's) or blonde (like Nui's). Apparently, blonde hair must be a recessive gene that both of her parents have, seeing that only then one of her daughters have blond hair (then again, Nui is an artificial human who has some of her mother's genes as a basis) and both of her other daughters have black hair.
• In the epilogue of Son of the Sannin, Naruto and Hinata are shown to have an infant daughter who inherited her paternal grandmother's red hair, something that is noted as being strange in-universe (not to mention impossible in real life since her mother's side of the family only has shades black, brown, and blue).
• Inverted in Transcendence. Ichigo's naturally orange hair stands out on Earth, but it fits in easily enough on a world like Azeroth. In fact, given that he's a sixteen year old boy with powers rivaling that of the world's demigods, his hair is often seen as one of the few normal things about him.

Films — Animation

• In Coraline, the title character's parents both have dark brown hair while her own hair is blue. It's actually dyed blue and you can see in the picture with her and her parents at the zoo that her real hair color is brown, like her parents.
• In Frozen (2013), Queen Elsa has platinum blonde hair, but her sister Princess Anna and her father Agdar have strawberry blonde hair and her mother Idunn is a brunette. Word of God states it's a case of Mystical White Hair because of her ice powers. Had she not been born with them, she would've been a brunette like her mother.
• Violet Parr from The Incredibles has long raven black hair while both her father and younger brother have blonde hair and her mother has auburn hair. Because dark genes are dominant she should have had brown hair at the darkest. However, considering her gloomy personality, it is possible that she wanted to dye it black. The Parrs/Incredibles have hereditary superpowers, so it's possible that genetics aren't quite the same for them, and Violet's hair is natural.
• Remy from Ratatouille has a blue fur tone that is unlikely to occur in wild rats. In pet rats, "blue" coloured rats do exist but are rare.
• In Turning Red, the women in the Lee family gain bright vermillion hair when their shape-shifting powers are awakened and they first change back from their red panda forms. Red hair is possible among people of Chinese descent but it is found only within a specific ethnic minority. It should also be noted that the adult Lee women all have black hair, suggesting their hair either returned to normal after they had their red panda forms sealed away or that they dye it to hide the red.

Films — Live-Action

• Simon Phoenix, the main villain of Demolition Man is a black guy with blond hair. No explanation for this is ever given. But then again Phoenix is eccentric.
• My Life as a Dog: Manne, Ingemar’s friend, has an unusual genetic trait. Manne’s natural blonde hair is a slight shade of green due to genetics. This makes Manne as much of an outsider as Ingemar.

Jokes

• A blond-haired missionary staying with a remote tribe is summoned by the angry chieftain, who demands to know why his third wife just gave birth to a child with pale hair like the missionary. The missionary explains that it sometimes happens in nature, such as the one black-wooled sheep in the chieftain's flock. The chieftain looks around for a moment and says he'll keep quiet about the kid if the missionary will keep quiet about the sheep.

Literature

• Baccano! has all but one character that keeps it away from probable hair colors (very few have black hair, but most of the cast is either American or European) — Sylvie Lumiere. She's mentioned to be silver-haired in the novels' narration, so being a stylized blond is out.
• Simon from the Darkest Powers books has blond hair despite being Asian. Many people mistake it for being bleached however his hair is natural.
• Fury (Salman Rushdie): Malik (who is Indian) and his white brunette wife Eleanor have a blonde son, Asmaan; Malik's narration lampshades how rare this is.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Mikuru is a redhead, possibly as a clue that she's from a time in the future when Japanese people with naturally bright red hair apparently exist. Tsuruya's long green hair is still a mystery, but it's possible that it could be a stylized black hair.
• Night World: Ha-nahkt, Hannah Snow's second incarnation, had naturally blonde hair, like both her original and current incarnations, despite being Egyptian (as in an Ancient Egyptian). ^note it's not specified if Ha'nahkt was alive before or after the Greeks and Romans arrived in Egypt, which would've helped make lighter hair colors more common amongst the population. Maya actually comments that her coloring is unusual for her birthplace.
• No. 6's Sion/Shion, whose originally brown hair was changed to a stark white due the trauma of almost dying from a parasitic bee's attack.
• In Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!, the human characters have brown or black hair (realistic colors for Japanese people) while the alien characters have unusual colors (Nyarko's is silver, Cuuko's is red, Hasta's is yellow).
• In Project NRI, artistic license gives Takasawa Juuri purple hair. The same goes for Kumoki Ame who has pink hair, and Yami Hikari who has green hair.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, the three children of King Robert Baratheon all have blond hair, even though Robert is dark-haired and every other child ever born to a Baratheon and Lannister (all of the Lannisters are blond, including Robert's wife Cersei) has had dark hair. The children are later revealed to actually be the offspring of the queen's brother Jaime. Cersei hated her husband and hardly ever slept with him, but had carried on a sexual relationship with her twin from childhood.
• Warrior Cats: Many characters have pelt colours that aren't plausible or even possible for actual cats. For example, male tortoiseshells are very rare yet Redtail and Sol exist, and in the former's case he sired kits despite male torties usually being sterile. Blackstar, Lionblaze, Mistyfoot, Ivypool, Graystripe, Brambleclaw, Sandstorm, and Mothwing are a few of the cats who have pelt colours and patterns that are genetically inaccurate.

Live-Action TV

• Still Standing: Lauren is a redhead even though her parents and siblings are all brunettes. Might be plausible since her maternal grandmother is a redhead.
• Eerie, Indiana: Dash X is a teenager with grey hair.

Manhwa

• Yureka: Hair color is somewhat unusually varied for Korea. Yureka is blonde, most notably. Of course, nothing states that all the characters are of Korean descent (although text suggests the Net can only be used within the country) and it is set an indeterminate time in the future. Can thus be reasoned out or interpreted as Hair Color Dissonance.

Religion and Mythology

• In Judaism, the red heifer is a cow with a pure red coat — the presence of even two black hairs disqualifies it — that has special significance in ritual purification. The existence of a cow with such a coloration is so rare that only nine were recorded from the time of Moses to the destruction of the Second Temple (though two high priests sacrificed two each, so they were able to find at least two within one lifetime).

Tabletop Games

• Some Nyalans in Spears of the Dawn have giant blood in their veins, which can lead to them having red, yellow or white hair despite otherwise having African features and colouring.

Video Games

• Dead or Alive: Kasumi is a natural redhead, and Ayane has purple hair. Even in a flashback showing both of them as small children.
• Eriko Christy from Illbleed has violet hair, while her friend Michel's hair is dark green. The latter could just be dyed, but same as with the aforementioned Ayane, Eriko is shown to have had purple locks as a young girl, implying that it's her natural color. Every other clearly human character has a normal coloration.
• Every girl in the original arcade of The Idolmaster has dark brown or black hair. Except Yayoi, whose hair is red with no explanation. Later, when the game was ported to the 360, some of the girls' hair became dark blue (like Chihaya) or dark purple (Azusa), but that can be considered stylized black, while the brown haired girl's hair lightened. Then, they introduced Miki, who has...blonde hair. Turns out, she dyes it. When Idolm@ster 2 came out, they added Takane, whose silver hair remains unexplained.
• More common than not in the modern Persona games. Only three major characters (Makoto Yuki, Fuuka, and Naoto) have truly impossible hair (Dark blue, teal, and dark blue again, respectively); but Mitsuru, Chidori, Rise, and Futaba have red hair, Akihiko, Takaya, and Yu have white or grey hair, Ken, Yosuke, Chie, Haru, and Akechi have light brown hair, and Aigis, Kanji, Teddie, Ryuji, and Ann have blond hair (Although Aigis and Teddie aren't human, Kanji and Ryuji are explicitly dyed - with Kanji's natural color being black - and Ann has it explained as being 1/4 American). Even Koromaru the dog, an albino, is unusually colored. In comparison, there are only eight characters (Junpei, Metis, Jin, Adachi, Yukiko, Joker, Makoto Niijima, and Yusuke) with black hair and one (Shinjiro) with dark brown.
• Misty and Lorelei from Pokémon Red and Blue stand out with their red hair. Most other characters in the games either have black hair, brown hair, or stylized colours that resemble those colours. The exception is Lt. Surge, a blond but explicitly American character. Being naturally red haired and Japanese is possible, but rare. Future Pokémon games give characters whatever hair colors they please.
• Surprisingly, most Japanese characters in Sengoku Basara have realistic brown or black hair, except for Kasuga, Sorin and Rikyu, who are blond, and Kotaro, Magoichi and Yoshiteru, who are redheads. No one draws attention to this and it's apparently natural. There're also no fewer than six (young) characters with white/silver hair, implying it's an even more common occurrence than a blond or a redhead in the Basaraverse. Sakon one-ups everybody else by having two-tone hair.

Visual Novels

• Umineko: When They Cry is full of examples, especially for a cast that's (supposedly) pure-bred Japanese.
  • There seems to be a trend with red hair: both Battler and Ange share the same dark red hair color, but their parents have different hair colors (might be disputed, since Battler's mother isn't ever described in detail and isn't even his real mother). Eva is a Fiery Redhead, and Maria shares the brown-red hair color.
  • Kyrie has white hair, which no one questions. Note that her skin tone is the same as the other women. At the very end of the story, Battler's hair also goes white, which symbolizes his acceptance of that fact that she was his real mother.
  • Natsuhi has multi-colored hair that starts out as light brown, goes to brown, and ends with (you guessed it!) red.
  • Krauss and Rosa both have really light brown hair.
  • Natsuhi's daughter, Jessica, is the only (human) character in the cast to have blonde hair.

Web Animation

• RWBY: On the world of Remnant, people honour the memory of a terrible global war that sought to suppress individuality and artistic expression by naming children after colour associations and letting people express their personalities through clothing styles, hair dyes, and other forms of artistic expression. As a result, a number of characters have hair colours that may or may not be natural, but which are nevertheless unusual, sometimes in hue, sometimes due to ambiguous ethnicity, where any unnatural tints are entirely down to hair dye used on natural hair colour.
  • White hair colour (not age-related): Weiss is a teenager who was born with snow-white hair. It's inherited from her mother's side of the family, as her mother, sister and brother all have snow-white hair as well.
  • Grey hair colour (not age-related):
    • Mercury Black is connected to silver, metallic and grey colour themes. His hair and eyes are a matching metallic grey in colour.
    • Sky Lark from Team CRDL has a metallic theme to his appearance, his hair is a steel grey in colour, with a bluish tint to it.
    • Gwen Darcy from Team NDGO has charcoal grey hair that's so dark it looks very nearly black in certain lighting.
  • Blonde Hair Colour: Arslan has dark skin but very pale blonde hair.
  • Orange hair colour:
    • Cardin Winchester from Team CRDL has hair that is the orange side of chestnut.
    • Roman Torchwick has orange hair similar in shade to a pumpkin.
    • Penny Polendina and Nora Valkyrie both have red hair that looks more orange than red. In both cases, the hair is indicated to be natural, given Penny's true nature and the fact that Nora has a flashback to a time when she was an abandoned street urchin.
  • Reddish hair colour:
    • Neon Katt's hair colour is red but it's on the pinky side which gives it a slightly unnatural look. Her cat tail is the same shade, but the tip has clearly been dyed pink. Her fringe contains two dyed streaks of cyan-blue.
    • Octavia Ember has burgandy colour hair that can look quite red in certain lighting.
    • Nolan Porfirio has burgandy colour hair that can vary in look between purple-tinted to mahogany depending on lighting.
• In the Strong Bad Email "japanese cartoon", Strong Bad imagines his anime counterpart, Stinkoman as for some reason, having blue hair.

Webcomics

• Blonde blue-eyed Chinese women aren't exactly common but that's what Wei Wei from Beloved L looks like. In comparison, everyone else is dark eyed and dark haired.
• Pretty much all the main characters of Megatokyo. This is tricky to spot because nearly all the strips are black-and-white, but you can see it in the rare coloured strips and book covers. Kimiko has a light-brown-blonde colour. Erika's hair is orange-red. Miho's hair is purple, but given who she is, it may not be natural.
• Qiu Tong from Their Story stands out as the only blond amongst a cast of brown and black haired characters. According to flashbacks it is likely natural, unless she began bleaching it at a young age.

Western Animation

• Terry and Matt McGinnis in Batman Beyond both have black hair despite the fact that their parents are redheads. Justified in that it's later revealed that Bruce Wayne is their biological father.
• Chris Griffin of Family Guy has blond hair, despite the fact that his father's hair is brown and his mother's a redhead. None of his grandparents have blond hair either, making it less likely that Peter carries a blond allele. His hair probably stems from the original design for his mother Lois, who was a blonde until they changed it.
• In the Life With Loopy shorts on KaBlam!, Loopy has blue hair while her mom is a blonde and her dad and brother are redheads. And according to a few old photos seen in "Send In The Clones", it's natural.
• Lincoln Loud of The Loud House has white hair, while his sisters have either brown or blonde hair (except Lucy, who has black hair, though given her goth personality, it's probably dyed and one episode implied she's naturally blonde). Although Word of God implied it's not his natural color, several of his baby pictures show that it was white even back then. Apparently, he inherited it from his grandfather.
• Young Justice:
  • Artemis is half-Asian and half-white. She also has blonde hair. Artemis in the original comics is completely white. In response to criticism from fans on Artemis' hair, it was noted that she's based on a girl the writers knew who is also biracial and a natural blonde.
  • Lian, the daughter of the Asian supervillain Cheshire and the white superhero Red Arrow, was originally introduced in the comics as a white-looking ginger like her father. She was later changed into looking more like her mother. In Young Justice, Lian keeps her revised design however she has her original red hair. As her mother is biracial in Young Justice, it's not exactly impossible for Lian to turn out a redhead.

Real Life

• The page image is of a Melanesian boy; in some South Pacific populations, like the Australian Aborigines, many children are born with light hair. Although this usually turns dark brown later in life, a few individuals have blond hair into adulthood. Some groups also have a very high incidence of albinism because of genetic isolation.
• Current Asian culture and beauty norms are heavily influenced by the West, so it's not uncommon for Asian girls to dye their hair. This is especially true of certain alternative subcultures like the Japanese Ganguro trend. There are also a small number of East Asians (especially Koreans) with natural light brown, dark blond, or reddish hair. Going back further in time, some ethnic and religious segments of Asia and the Middle East have traditions of dyeing their hair red with henna.
• Red or blond hair is more common than many Westerners think among South and Central Asian peoples, like the Kalash, Nuristanis, Tajiks, Uyghurs, and Mongols (Genghis Khan himself was supposedly a green-eyed redhead, but there isn't any evidence to suggest this was the case). Light-coloured hair also naturally occurs in Middle Eastern and North African populations, like the Kurds and Berbers. It's worth noting that similar to the South Pacific case, non-European Eurasian blondness is more common among the young.
• Kwashiorkor (a form of severe malnutrition) can cause one's hair to turn red. The effect is especially jarring in ethnic populations that usually have brown or black hair, such as sub-Saharan Africans.
• Spike Milligan and his Army mates were astonished in 1943 to visit an Arab village in Tunisia where everybody had bright natural red hair. They nicknamed it Glen MacDonald. A cultured officer with an Oxbridge education pointed out that the Romans, the Visigoths and the Normans had all been this way and all were European peoples, especially the Scandinavian Normans. Could they be surprised?
• This can also arise from being mixed race. For example, the Afro-American activist Malcolm X earned the nickname "Detroit Red" due to the reddish tinge in his hair that he inherited from a Scottish ancestor. His friend John Elroy Sanford of Sanford and Son fame was similarly nicknamed "Chicago Red" and eventually "Redd Foxx" due to the similar colouration of his own hair.

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