When I dyed my hair, I expected to miss the compliments. I didn't expect to miss the assumptions.
This summer I did something I had spent years promising everyone I would never do: I dyed my hair brown. To most people, that likely doesn't sound remarkable. But anyone who knows me knows my natural strawberry-blonde hair has always been one of my defining features. Growing up, strangers would stop my family in grocery stores just to admire it. Hairdressers begged me never to dye it. "People would pay for this color," they’d often say. By the time I was twelve, I’d heard enough cautionary tales about women who dyed their red hair only to "lose it forever" that I firmly convinced myself changing it would mean giving up a part of who I was.
This summer, however, I found myself asking a different question. My red hair has undeniably shaped my identity, but how much has it shaped everyone else's perception of me? So, I decided to conduct a small experiment. Armed with semi-permanent hair dye (as the fear of regret still lingers) and a healthy dose of curiosity, I temporarily traded my red hair for brown. I didn’t do it hoping for a new identity, but instead it was an excuse to conduct my own miniature ethnography. The differences were subtle, but still revealing. They confirmed something I had been suspecting for awhile, that my hair wasn't just part of my identity, but had become a part of everyone else's perception of me. At work, the daily comments about my hair disappeared. The kind compliments from elderly customers faded, but with them did the uncomfortable remarks from middle-aged men. Friends made fewer ginger jokes. Conversations that once began with my appearance simply… Well, they didn't.
A close friend, when I asked how she would feel if I dyed my hair, replied that she needed time to prepare beforehand. She laughed that she couldn't imagine me as anything other than a ginger. I kept thinking about what she'd said. She wasn't reacting to a new hairstyle, she was reacting to the temporary loss of something she unconsciously considered an integral part of my identity.
What surprised me the most wasn't that people treated me differently. It was how quickly they stopped seeing something that had always seemed impossible to ignore. I hadn't changed. My interests, personality, and values were exactly the same. Yet removing one visible characteristic quietly changed the story people seemed to tell themselves about me before I had even spoken a single word, and that realization reminded me why I was drawn to anthropology in the first place. Culture isn't only made through traditions, languages, or history. It's also built through the small assumptions we make every day, like the split-second impressions formed from appearance, education, accent, or background. Most people never have the opportunity to watch those assumptions change in real time, but this summer I did.
As I pursue anthropology, I hope to keep asking questions that begin with ordinary moments and lead to deeper understanding. My summer experiment started with a box of drug store hair dye, but it became a bigger lesson in perception, identity, and the power of assumptions. Anthropology invites us to question the stories we inherit about other people, and sometimes even the stories we inherit about ourselves.
Red hair can be a blessing or a curse. Historically, we are fiery, we are ill-tempered, we are lustful, or maybe we just look like carrots. At the same time, we are admired; separated out for our great beauty and rarity.
My father always wanted a red-haired daughter. When I was born, and he watched the nurse scrub me off, he and the nurse were delighted to find that it wasn't blood staining my scalp, but the beginnings of a mane of red ringlets. Since, all I can remember is the constant comments from older women, all of whom couldn't resist the cacophonous anthem of:
"Never change your hair."
"So many women would die to have that color."
"Women dye their hair to look like that."
While well-intended, and certainly well-received by myself, it marks you as different, and it means you are eternally bound in a contract of being both an outsider, and someone who is obliged not to do anything about it. I've been very lucky that I haven't faced bullying or prejudice for my hair, but feeling singled out has not been much better. It doesn't help that I feel in all other ways to be different: a perpetual outsider who cannot possibly fit with the rest of humanity.
Recently I've begun to stop ignoring that. I was diagnosed with OCD, and am currently seeking tests to consider Autism Spectrum Disorder as well. This has been nice, and helps me to better understand why I feel so misunderstood by the people around me. My intelligence, responsibility, competence, and all the other things that people praise me for, like my red hair, are things secretly representing something else. My anxiety, intrusive thoughts, fear of disappointing those around me, and my difficulty to interact socially with other people are all traits hiding behind the front of a "gifted" child. I am both beautiful and stoic on the outside, but on the inside it feels like a mask: a way to conceal confusion and dread lying underneath.
What one sees on the outside, and how one is perceived, is not the whole story. So many people, for all of history, have been misunderstood or felt like outsiders. They've been singled out for their appearance, their race, their sex, or personality. I don't want that to continue. Nobody should feel scared to defy the perceptions that other people have of them. It's okay to change, and it's okay to make other people understand that the image of you they've constructed is not the full picture.
I read once in a book about 20th century violence at the US-Mexico border, an anecdote from the author about her experience doing research for the book at a local archive. In it, she found a tape recording of a man recounting his experiences with this violence, and she was told by the archivist that the story wasn't important. As someone who wants to be an archivist myself, I was stunned. How can we, as stewards of history, deny someone's truth. The beauty of historic preservation is precisely to see how people truly viewed themselves, and all the ups and downs of their life.
As I am more and more able to come into my own, less bound by the expectations of society, I hope to be able to do the same for people who never had the chance to do so themselves. To preserve and present the real people of the past would be the honor of my life, and in turn would help me present my authentic self, red hair and all.
"So like, do the curtains match the drapes?"
The first time someone asked me that, I was in the seventh grade. Vulgar? Most definitely. However honestly, it isn't the craziest thing I've ever heard uttered about my hair.
Growing up, I took great pride in my red hair. My mother would tell me: 'Evelyn, you have the rarest hair in the world.' Old ladies in the supermarket would stop us to tell me they were envious. Hairdressers would make me promise to never dye it. 'People would kill for this color!' they'd exclaim.
I don’t remember being made fun of or treated differently as a child, and being homeschooled up until my junior year of high school is probably a big reason for that. In our home, learning was curiosity-driven and personal. I was encouraged to ask questions, explore big ideas, and think for myself. My red hair, like my sometimes quirky interests or deep love for ballet, was simply one more thing that made me, me.
However, one thing that became immediately apparent to me upon entering public school, is that being ginger makes you the first target for uncomfortable comments, and being homeschooled only adds fuel to the fire.
"What do you mean you're homeschooled AND a ginger?! Did your parents hate you or what?"
That's something a close friend once said to me. I think she meant it as a joke, but after hearing the same "joke" hundreds of times from almost everyone, it didn't really feel like one.
At first, I laughed it off. I didn’t want to seem sensitive or dramatic. I became more cautious about what I shared, even joking about myself to blend in. But that didn’t feel right either.
Even the well-meaning comments stung: “But you’re so normal for a homeschooler!” Which I suppose was meant to be a compliment, but it was also loaded with stereotypes. Why do these assumptions exist? What about having red hair makes someone a target for open ridicule? Why are homeschoolers seen as anti-social or sheltered, even when they’ve been socially engaged their whole lives? And why are these traits seen as inherently bad, instead of something to be understood, or even celebrated?
These questions were more than just thoughts passing through my mind, they began to fuel a curiosity I had long wanted to explore. I became fascinated with discovering how people shape their identities and how outside pressure and judgement plays a role in it. How language and "harmless jokes" often reveal deeper biases.
This is what led me to anthropology. My senior year I took AP Language and Composition, a class that is deeply structured around culture and the human experience. For our semester project, we were assigned an ethnography, where we observed a specific subculture. That assignment lit something up in me. I realized I didn’t just want to ask questions, I wanted to study the systems, histories, and patterns that inform how we relate to one another. I wanted to find out what creates culture.
I plan to study anthropology because I’m drawn to the complexity of the human experience. My own journey, from being misunderstood to understanding others, has shown me how powerful, and sometimes painful, that shaping can be. But it’s also shown me the importance of looking closer. The things that once made me feel different have become the lens through which I see others more clearly. They’ve prepared me not just to study culture, but to contribute to it, with empathy, curiosity, and a genuine desire to make space for every person and every story.
I have always noticed people’s differences. To me, it comes as naturally as breathing to notice that some people do not mind stepping on sidewalk cracks while I avoid them like my life depends on it.
I like to think I do this because I am attentive, but the more likely answer is that it comes from being someone fundamentally different. I am different from my family, who practice or study heavily mathematical fields; different from my friends, because of my OCD and the way that I think, and I’m different from the majority of my peers because I am queer. The myriad of characteristics I have listed that set me apart are not physical, yet to top it all off, I am also different because of my hair.
You might imagine that growing up with red hair, the worst I could get is an occasional “Weasley” joke–which I did, frequently– and it certainly does not help that my name is Ginny ( I promise I am not named after the character). Notably, however, I am the only redhead in my family, not even my twin brother. Towering over me at a whole foot taller, he is an athlete, studies material engineering, and has dirty blonde hair. Growing up beside him felt like living in a shadow: I did not care for math or competing in tennis– what I cared about was art.
When I was growing up, I did not always know what I would study or what diagnoses awaited me, yet I always knew that I loved art. I filled sketchbooks with drawings of characters I made on dress-up games, watercolored in sketchbooks that really had no business being watercolored in, and covered my hands with gouache paint. When I reached middle school, my dad pulled an old table out of storage and designated a corner in the basement to be a makeshift studio. Art was my favorite thing in the world, and even extended into my classes at school. So, when I eventually had to step away from it in place of other studies, I had to scrape out time for art at home.
However disappointed I was, it helped me evolve in theater and marching band. In the midst of an OCD diagnosis, I threw myself into these new passions. By my senior year, I had become the drum major for the marching band and the stage manager for the theater program. This also led to the discovery of my love for the humanities, more specifically, psychology and anthropology.
All of a sudden, my world opened: there was a field all about the differences in humans! I learned about how cultures developed, why those different cultures had different traditions, and why, despite all of that, humans are still so similar. My love for psychology has always remained strong, but being able to also learn about humans and our cultures has captivated me.
I am now in my second year of undergrad at Butler University with a combined Anthropology and Psychology major, and I am still fixated on people’s differences. I notice them, I study them, I paint them, and I live them. I am so grateful for my red hair, because it taught me, before anything, how to be different.
