Photographer challenges perception of redheads with stunning portrait series

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A photographer is challenging the stereotypical assumptions of how a redhead should look.

Photographer Michelle Marshall’s series MC1R demonstrates that redheads are not all white, shooting a series of portraits of people of mixed race and African-Caribbean descent.

Her work’s title comes from the MC1R gene, also known as Melanocortin 1 receptor, responsible for the varying shades of red hair.

In order to inherit the gene, both parents need to be carriers and although Scotland accounts for the highest percentage of gingers in the world (13 per cent of the population, apparently), the unusual mutation can be found all over the world.

Researchers believe the spread of the gene comes from historical interactions between Europeans and Africans during the colonial periods in the Caribbean or parts of South America.

"This might also explain why you occasionally see red hair on a black Caribbean person who has two black parents,” Dr George Busby from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetic told VICE. “By chance alone, it might be that they are both carrying a European mutation which has come together in their child."

Ms Marshall, although delighting in the positive reception her beautiful portraits have received, wants her work to be grounded by a more scientific understanding of the unique genetic formations.

Especially as there remains little research on the area despite the UK’s growing mix-raced population. "I want to stir the perception that most of us have of a redhead as a white Caucasian individual potentially of Celtic descent," she told VSCO earlier this year.