“Anything that makes you special, whether that is red hair or a quality, like introversion, is something you should not hide, but rather celebrate proudly and exuberantly and make it your unique selling point,” the festival website reads, adding that people from more than 80 countries have attended throughout the years.
About 1 to 2 percent of people with European ancestry have red hair, according to a 2019 academic paper, though the number can be higher in areas such as Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and depending on the definition of red hair.
Throughout the years, discussions about bullying, discrimination and “cultural stigma” against those with red hair have repeatedly come to the fore in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
In Scotland, for example, a deputy leader for the Labour Party caused a scandal in 2010 when she called a senior coalition minister a “ginger rodent,” an insult for which she later apologized. And a 2005 “South Park” episode titled “Ginger Kids” — in which the main character treats red hair like a disease — has routinely been cited as a cultural contagion for bullying redheads and was repeatedly blamed for reported assaults in the United States, the U.K. and Canada, where people participated in a viral movement to hold a “Kick a Ginger Day.”
The Redhead Days Festival started informally in 2005, when its director, a painter named Bart Rouwenhorst, put out a newspaper ad for 15 red-haired models and received registration information from 150. Because Rouwenhorst “had trouble saying no,” he asked all the models to gather for a group photo, according to the festival’s website. The event then inspired him to start formally organizing the event, which holds a 2013 entry in Guinness World Records for the largest gathering of natural redheads, with 1,672 such people in one photo.
With slogans such as, “A face without freckles is like a night without stars,” the festival took place over the weekend, with a large crowd of redheads in the same color T-shirt listening to music and bouncing pool floaties above their heads or enjoying beers and barbecued meats on a grassy lawn. Organizers told Reuters that some 5,000 redheads attended.
The theme color of this year’s gathering was hibiscus rose, which, according to organizers, “looks great on redheads.”