Being Ginger Is Cool
At the top of a Swiss mountain, as a 7 year old, an incident took place that shaped my perception of what it meant to be ginger for me. As my father pretended to be James Bond, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, following a ridiculously terrifying cable car journey up to the revolving restaurant perched precariously atop the Schilthorn, a group of American ladies with incredibly loud voices emerged from the elevator.
“Oh my gawwwwwwd,” bellowed one of the ladies in her luminous pink 1980’s salopettes, “would you just look at that little redhead? Isn’t he just gorgeous?!”
As a gaggle of cooing, boisterous middle-aged ladies surrounded me and analysed the colour of my hair, I had no idea precisely how deeply that incident would shape my self-esteem. Even the entire Day-Glo spectrum of skiwear they were sporting hadn’t dimmed the light shining from my tiny little red head. Never arrogant, certainly not ever over-confident, I’ve always had a great relationship with my hair, one or two minor challenges excepted, since that bright and sunny day thousands of meters above sea level in Switzerland.
30 years on and you cannot read a newspaper, sit through an MTV awards show, catch a Hollywood blockbuster or watch a season of a hugely popular television show, without being smacked in the face with an obvious fact. Being ginger is incredibly cool. It was cool before the word cool was used to describe something other than temperature; it’s cool now that the word cool is no longer cool. Perhaps, if I were to use some of the terminology I hear from the teenagers at my cricket club in England, one could say being ginger is bad; being ginger is sick. Before you reach for your mobile phone and attack, I’m reassured that if something is bad or sick it’s actually really very good. Being ginger is, some may say, more than just a hair colour — it’s a lifestyle. Granted, they’re probably trying to flog you a bunch of skin or hair care products you have no fundamental reason to consume, but it’s a perfectly positive slogan all the same.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves; it’s surely just a hair colour, right? Superficially yes, it is. I am in no doubt at all that it helps to shape some of our life experiences. Sadly many people still experience tremendous hardships and my heart goes out to the very small number of incidents that crop up from time to time in, I hate to admit, the British press mostly. I stand by the assertion that bullying and discrimination says significantly more about the perpetrator than it does about the victim, and this is precisely why I chose to focus exclusively on positive anecdotes about red hair with GWA.
Leaving that to one side, I wanted to take this opportunity to focus on the avalanche of positives I stumble across on a daily basis as a 38 year-old man that started a brand of clothing, Ginger With Attitude, to share my own sense of ginger pride with as many people as I could possibly reach.
Music of Ginger Origin
Whether you like his flavour of music or not, it’s practically impossible to live on this planet and to have not heard of Ed Sheeran. His ruffled, scruffy ginger mop and vast array of tattoos are ubiquitous globally and I smiled joyfully when I learnt recently that he’s starting his own record label, Gingerbread. Search beyond the pale, scratch beneath the freckled surface of Ed’s global domination and you’ll soon discover that Ed isn’t the only ginger musician confounding the fallacy that only “gingers have no soul.” We have as much soul as the next person, and below are a few examples of up and coming artists I’ve discovered along the way, sharing their YouTube channels, Soundcloud links and tour information without ever expecting anything in return.
Karl William Lund from Liverpool is tremendously talented;
Nina Baker
Orla Gartland
Rosie Bans, Mike Nisbet & Anna Macdonald — Artpackt
Gavin James
At Redhead Day UK in 2014 we hosted the first ever Music Of Ginger Origin Awards to recognise and celebrate redheaded musical talent from the grass roots upwards. Jessica Shailes from Everything for Redheads kindly constructed an online poll offering anyone that discovered it to vote for their favourite ginger male, female and ginger by choice act. Ed won Best Male; Kate Nash, who we hope will one day embark on a hair odyssey and, like the song, go back to her roots; Florence Welch of the machines beat off stiff competition from Hayley Williams of Paramour to win the award for Best Dyed Redhead.
It all started as just another pun, just another tshirt design for Ginger With Attitude but after receiving national press coverage in the UK it will hopefully develop into an annual, nomadic awards ceremony with no fixed abode.
For 2016, we’re relocating the awards to the Irish Redhead Convention — http://www.redheadconvention.com
Cast your vote here if you have two spare minutes!
https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/121jOhdcsjVVcRtO409uJpB5MhPVgzPJVtfJ2AHjJFlY/edit
