Deconstructing unnatural hair colour

Basically I'm writing a story set in the distant future where everyone there has colourful hair in all spectrums of the rainbow, but I am having trouble realistically explaining the You Gotta Have Blue Hair trope especially when the normal range of human hair-colour ranges from (blond, black, red, brown)... Some of the characters in my story have buzz-cut red hair, wavy purple hair, pink hair and green hair (wildly ranging from lime-green to dark-green) and even white hair (a youthful detective character of mine). Natural hair colours are still there, but are considered a rarity amongst the human population...

For example, my character's hair colour primarily comes from their genetics. Olapen's father had purple hair and blue eyes, hir mother had orange hair and silver eyes. Their daughter Olapen then has purple hair and silver eyes.

edited 5th Jun '18 9:33:49 PM by sabrina_diamond

Are you trying to explain why these colors exist?

If it's natural you can always go for the usual SF "genetic engineering" reason.

Designer babies maybe.

Codominant genes for primary colors can get a little close to LEGO Genetics but it could be done.

Hair is genetics, don't explain it unless it involves genetic alteration. If you want your character/race to stand out, make sure that their genetic features are unique to them alone. I also suggest using multiple features.

Claymore is a good example, the titular warriors have blond hair and silver eyes causing them to stand out amongst other characters and bystanders (especially when the Claymores are in a group).

edited 5th Jun '18 11:06:44 PM by ParaChomp

The way I have it in my stories is that Venusians all have variants of green hair (ranging from lime-green hair to fern green) to demonstrate that they are plant-creatures facading as humans (see my earlier posts on them). And the Martian race are psychics with wild hair colours (pink to snow white) to show their genetic variants.

The main problem is why the human race has their hair-colour being rainbow influenced too. And am I the only author to have their character literally grow out their hair between storylines? Misako used to have shorter (bob-styled) hair in my earlier stories, but by the more modern/newer stories, her hair is now a much shaggier and longer variant of green-blonde due to spending too much time in other dimensions...

edited 6th Jun '18 12:22:31 AM by sabrina_diamond

Like I said, make it a combination of hair and eyes. Maybe restrict natural eye colours to humans and give your other species' a specific unnatural eye colour.

Technically, the only issue in having colourful hair is, from the viewpoint of how hair colours happen at all, one of having a pigment of a specific colour there. This means that you need something that makes the body of the person with such hair produce this pigment, but when you have sci-fi tech and presumable genetic engineering to use at will this can be easily hand-waved because ultimately there isn't any more to it, it's just having the body produce an appropriate pigment instead of one from the pool of those that our bodies produce.

That said, white hair would either be a very low amount of a light pigment (just like blonde people who have very little pigment can end up with silvery-white hair), or one heck of a weird thing ... though not impossible, going with the above thing.

edited 7th Jun '18 1:24:47 PM by Kazeto