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Asked by cherrywool to Barbara, Matt, Ravinder, Sophie, Tristan on 10 Mar 2015.
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Matthew Moore answered on 10 Mar 2015:
Not as far as I’m aware! If somebody inherited a brown and a ginger gene then their hair colour would be brown, as it’s dominant to ginger. For someone to be ginger at all they need to inherit two ginger genes.
However, this is completely possible in other animals, if you look up mosaicism in cats you’ll get some cool pictures of cats with fur colour split directly down the middle for example. It’s pretty striking!
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Barbara Shih answered on 10 Mar 2015:
It might be possible in some specific situtations (such as mutations occuring early in the developement causing mosaic), but very unlikely. You can have patches of cells that lose their pigmentation though – my uncle had a patch of blond hair when he was about 50 year-old (his normal hair colour of black) due to lost of pigmentation in that patch of scalp, and his student thought he was a cool professor who dyed his hair.
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Sophie Robinson answered on 11 Mar 2015:
All the cells that produce hair are derived from a few cells within an embryo. These cells divided and divided to eventually become the skin cells that hair grows from. If these cells have one gene for ginger and one gene for brown hair, then they will produce brown hair as brown is dominant over ginger.
Like Matthew and Barbara said, a process called mosaicism can create patches of ginger and brown in animals.
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