Some characters have hair colours that are rare or unusual. Maybe their hair is abnormal for their parentage or ethnicity, maybe their hair is outright abnormal for their species period, but their hair is actually natural. Others don't believe them, though. They think that their hair is dyed.
This trope is usually lighthearted, but it can it can also be Played for Drama if dyed hair is looked down upon as Delinquent Hair or if it causes rumors of the person being a Chocolate Baby.
Can lead to Mistaken for Subculture. Not to be confused with Mistaken for Dying. See also Your Costume Needs Work and Mistaken for Fake Hair. Compare and contrast Nonconformist Dyed Hair.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Ichigo and Orihime from Bleach both have orange hair, where most ethnic Japanese have dark brown or black hair. Ichigo mentions getting mistaken for a Japanese Delinquent because of it (he figured out he can mostly keep the school faculty at least from hassling him about it if he keeps his grades up), while Orihime was once attacked by another schoolgirl with a pair of scissors because of her hair color.
- In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Zenitsu's blond hair is often assumed to be dyed, but it's actually the result of being miraculously Locked into Strangeness by a bolt of lightning. In the High School AU gag strips, Giyu reprimands him for this and tells him to dye his blond hair black (which is actually a common policy in Japanese high schools, since unusually-colored hair is looked down upon as Delinquent Hair).
- Dragon Ball: When Chi-Chi first sees her son, Gohan, in Super Saiyan form, she immediately assumes that he bleached his hair. In actuality, Saiyan hair just turns blond when they go Super Saiyan.
- In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Goku makes the mistake of assuring Chi-Chi that it's not bleached (her main beef was that he took Gohan into the Hyberbolic Time Chamber and then suddenly demanded her to make Gohan a birthday cake without explaining the situation). She lets it go, because she knows how he's going to make it up to her.
- Some of the Zodiac members in Fruits Basket have rare or unusual hair colours by Japanese standards (or people, period), such as orange or black-and-white, which is a side effect of the animals of the Eastern Zodiac they're possessed by. Naturally, people who don't know about the curse tend to assume their hair is dyed. Some of them have faced bullying because of their hair colours; Kisa in particular suffers from some nasty school bullying due to her naturally golden hair and golden eyes, and even when she tried to tell her classmates her hair and eyes were natural, none of them believed her.
- Defied in the Ayanoi High School in GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class: students with unusual hair colors (such as Nodamiki, who has pink hair) can bring a childhood photo to clarify the hair color is natural.
- Sailor Moon:
- Makoto Kino has red hair in the manga, which is supposed to make her look like a Japanese Delinquent. In chapter five, one of the teachers mistakes her for one because of this.
- A number of Chibiusa's schoolmates question her naturally-pink hair.
- Hanamichi Sakuragi from Slam Dunk is a non-standard Japanese guy who's surprisingly tall and also has red hair, being mistaken for being Dye Hard. Being a Japanese Delinquent didn't helped because he was accused for having Delinquent Hair (pompadour included). Later in the manga and the anime series, he shaved his hair, showing his hair was really red and not made by dye.
Comic Books
- Scott Pilgrim: Zigzagged and Played for Laughs with Ramona. At one point, Ramona is asked if her hair color is natural or not, and Ramona is unable to tell herself. Due to the comic being in black and white, her hair looks to be colored black. Upon the comic being released in color though, her hair is clearly blue, which has an editor's note pointing out the part is funnier in black and white.
Film — Animation
- Parodied in Finding Nemo. Dory, a regal blue tang fish, mentions that she's a "natural blue" while sleep-talking.
- The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: Everybody thinks that Wyldstyle's black hair is her natural hair color with pink and blue highlights. Later, it is revealed that she had used a marker to dye her hair black while the pink and blue parts are her natural hair color.
Literature
- Cerberus High: When Kazuki is trying to make sense of his newfound Healing Factor, Sherbet makes a joke that all the blood from having been decked in the face with a sculpture was just his red hair dye running.
Sherbet: There wasn’t a scratch but there sure was a lot of blood. Or was it just your hair dye running?
Kazuki: Oi this color’s natural! - The blond Simon from Darkest Powers gets offended when people ask if his hair is dyed. He's half-Asian and half-white. Simon gets his blond hair from his mother.
- Elcenia: When Rhysel first sees Keo, she assumes that her green hair (including eyebrows!) is "either the work of magic or a very thorough dye job". In fact, Keo is a jade dragon, and Elcenian dragons keep their scale color when they shapeshift; females in humanoid shapes have scale-colored hair.
- Kodaka of Haganai has naturally blond hair thanks to his English ancestry. This alienates him from his peers, who all mistake him for a delinquent on sight because of this.
- The Lost Fleet: Inhabitants of the planet Éire all have green hair as a result of genetic manipulation done several generations before. Captain John "Black Jack" Geary is all set to discipline a junior officer for dyeing her hair before he learns this.
- Youko of The Twelve Kingdoms has implausibly red hair for a Japanese person, causing her parents to worry that she'll be mistaken for a delinquent that bleaches her hair. They try to get her to dye it black to prevent this.
- Where The Drowned Girls Go: Cora's blue hair is a Mark of the Supernatural, but students at the Whitethorn Boarding School of Horrors accuse her of dying it for attention. It's by design; Whitethorn Gaslights students into disbelieving their experiences in magical worlds and enforces conformity through bullying.
Live-Action TV
- Early in the first season of The Gifted (2017), Lorna/Polaris appears to have dark hair with dyed green streaks. At one point she's captured, and in the prison shower, the dye washes out... the black dye, revealing her hair to be naturally a vivid green. As in the comics, she colours it to hide that she's a mutant, although it's a bigger deal in the anti-mutant police state the series is set in.
- Inverted in Mirai Sentai Timeranger, where after Tatsuya learns that Sion is an alien, thinks that is why Sion's hair is green, only for Sion to tell him that he just likes to dye his hair.
- A related example from Star Trek: Voyager. In "The 37's", our heroes are being held hostage by people who have been frozen since the 20th century. Janeway tries to prove that aliens exist by showing off Kes' elf-like ears. Amelia Earhart (long story) isn't convinced, saying that she's seen people all over the world modify their bodies, so that doesn't mean that aliens exist.
Webcomics
- Genocide Man: Invoked by the Inuit Designer Baby Girii, who colours
her roots brown so that people think her telltale platinum-blonde hair is a dye job. It's a survival tactic — the One World Order summarily executes anyone and anything that's been genetically modified.
- The NSFW Furry Webcomic Shayla The Pink Mouse gets a visit from her brother while she's working at Trevor's convenience store. While the two siblings update each other, Shayla's boss and some regulars comment on Shayla's pink fur and her brother's teal fur. After Shayla points out that her large mouse ears heard their puerile chatter clearly, she goes on to explain that her ancestors lived in the Southwest painted desert, where pink and teal are typical landscape colors. Their fur coloration is actually a natural camouflage effect.
- In a Q&A strip of Twin Dragons, an interviewer asks Benji what product he uses to get his green hair. Benji reveals his green hair is natural, since his albinism interacts with his dog hybrid genetics by changing his hair pigmentation to green rather than simply lacking pigmentation.
- In Yokoka's Quest, Grace questions the pink-haired Yokoka, "Your hair is such a nice colour, is that natural?". Yokoka doesn't understand the question, as she's presumably unaware of hair dye.
- In this JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fan comic by Hajnarus, two mean boys accuse Kakyoin (who has red hair) of dyeing his hair because most Japanese people have black hair. When he says it's not dyed, they accuse him of wearing a wig, and then start ripping out his hair trying to find his "real" hair color. Fortunately, Hierophant Green is able to drive them off.
Web Original
- One submission on Not Always Learning centers on this trope. The submitter is half-Japanese, half-Irish, and has to prove to a substitute teacher that her red hair is in fact completely natural.
Western Animation
- Inverted and played straight in the Steven Universe episode "Last One Out of Beach City": Pearl doesn't understand how a human woman has pink hair like Rose did, so Steven explains what hair dye is. Later, Pearl talks to the woman offscreen, who is said to have made the opposite mistake about Pearl's pink-orange hair.
Pearl: I asked her about her hair, and then she asked how I colored mine. I told her, "My appearance is just a conscious manifestation of light." and she said, "I know how that is." although, heh, I highly doubt it.
- In The Venture Brothers, this contributes to Pete White being Mistaken for Gay (or is he?) by Shore Leave. (May be Write What You Know; series co-creator Doc Hammer has naturally two-tone hair and has talked about similar experiences.)
White: I-I am so not gay.
Shore Leave: With that pink shirt and that oh-so-sad dye job?
White: I'm an albino!
Real Life
- Japan is somewhat infamous for its no-tolerance policy towards hair dye in certain schools and professions, with schools in Tokyo being notoriously strict on anyone whose hair isn't the deep black natural to a vast majority of the native population, a problem for those who happen to be in the minority (including those of mixed ancestry). One highly publicized incident involved a student who (mostly successfully) sued her school after they repeatedly discriminated against her for her natural brown hair, forcing her to dye her hair black to "prove" she wasn't using hair dye.
