I hate the summer. For you, this is the time for short skirts, flip-flops and strapless tops, for becoming more attractive over a few short weeks. For me, it means turning hot and pink, sitting in the shade and, if I forget to reapply my factor 50, getting burnt in my lunch hour. For redheads, our behaviour pattern over the summer months is governed by the sun, or more specifically, by avoiding it.
There are many disadvantages to being a redhead. Having to tint otherwise transparent eyelashes, for one. Also we feel pain more acutely - there's a hormone linked to pain sensitivity, and redheads have higher amounts of it. Yet, there's no denying we're special - less than 2 per cent of the global population, and according to some scientists, threatened with extinction.
The cause of our redness is down to a single gene - the MC1R gene. Mutations and variations of this gene cause gingerness. If you have two copies of it, you will have red hair; if you only have one copy, you won't. One gene (dark hair) dominates over another (red hair).
My mother comforts me with the fact my genetic inheritance will mean I'll age more slowly - redheads have no choice but to stay out of the sun. Although she is pale and freckly, she is not ginger, nor was my father - but they were both carriers of the red-hair gene. When half of my mother's DNA fused with half of my father's DNA to create mine, I inherited the ginger genes from both; when the midwife handed me to my parents, my mother looked at my father in shock. "She's ginger!" she said.
The same MC1R gene responsible for red hair in humans crops up in other red creatures, too.
Our distant cousins include red setters, Highland cattle and red squirrels. It is estimated that the versions of the MC1R gene that cause red hair have been around for 20,000 to 40,000 years.
It's time for action - perhaps a government campaign showing us in a more positive light, or a dating website exclusive to redheads where we can make contact in a safe environment, free from dominant dark-hair genes. Our scarcity means we are less likely to meet, but I have managed two ginger relationships, though one was with a bald man - it wasn't until the third date that I focused on his eyebrows over dinner. "Are you ginger?" I asked before receiving the good news.
"Of course I bloody am," he said, as if I was blind rather than him bald.
If there were a decline in number, though, it'd be nice to think our rarity value might up our cachet.
We have been fashionable before. In the age of Elizabeth I, for example, and we could do no wrong as far as the Pre-Raphaelites were concerned. These days, though, it's a tougher sell, in spite of redhead heroes such as Damian Lewis and Julianne Moore.
I'm 37, and two weeks ago, when I was crossing a road, a group of three teenage boys began to circle me on their bikes, chanting: "Ginger! Ginger! Ginger!" I comforted myself with the fact that they could all of them be, unwittingly, carriers of the ginger gene. I wished a carrier wife and an entire brood of ginger children upon them.
The gingerometer
* 2004 Model of the Year Lily Cole's "red hair and porcelain skin makes her perfect for the ultra-feminine designs of the moment", says a Harper's Bazaar editor.
* At the height of her fame, Gillian Anderson was voted the World's Sexiest Woman by FHM.
* Proof, if any were needed, that ginger can mean gorgeous, Nicole Kidman hasn't always been happy with the looks that got her noticed.
* "I hate my freckles, I hate my red hair and I think I'm overweight when I see myself on screen," says Lindsay Lohan.
- OBSERVER
