how much grey are you ? ............... and on 'red hair' !!!

Passing of an year adds age – one becomes old, need not be mature or wiser.  As one ages, people are worried of falling hair, baldness and greying of hair.  Greying, euphemism ! – for Indians – black becoming white, exhibiting that the person is no longer young. Hair coloring is the practice of changing the colour of hair.  People have been resorting to hair dyeing for ages.  It involves treatment of the hair with various chemical compounds.  Then there is bleaching. Bleach and highlights remove colour from your hair by the process of oxidation. Oxidation decolourizes the pigment in your hair shaft, which is why bleach will turn your hair almost white if it’s left on for too long.  Hydrogen peroxide and ammonia are the most commonly used ones and are often mixed together, as used separately they’re unstable and very slow in lightening the hair.

Izhevsk is the capital city of the Udmurt Republic,Russia, located along the Izh River in the Western Urals.  It is the  nineteenth largest city in Russia and the largest in the republic. Its subjects are called Udmurts and speak the Udmurt language.  The Udmurt Republic is a full subject of the Russian Federation, formed on the national state principle. Udmurtia is a part of the Volga (Privolzhsky) Federal District and the Ural economic region. The capital is located 1129 km away from Moscow, 1904 km away from Saint-Petersburg, and 800 km away from Yekaterinburg.

Colours have a special appeal and spice up our lives. That is particularly true for hair colour. Whenever you feel like changing your look perking up your hair colour is an obvious option. While there are quite a few choices, not all colours match every type.  Hair color is the pigmentation of hair follicles due to two types of melanin: eumelanin and pheomelanin. Particular hair colors are associated with ethnic groups. The shades of human hair color are assessed using the Fischer–Saller scale.  For long them thought them to be black and white …….. but there apparently are more : Black, Brown, Blonde (nearly white to dark golden); Auburn (light to dark red-brown shades); Chestnut (reddish shade of brown) and Red hair ………..  Red hair ranges from light strawberry blond shades to titian, copper and less commonly "true" red. It is most prominently found in Scotland, Ireland and England. Scotland has the highest proportion of redheads; 13 percent of the population has red hair and approximately 40 percent carries the recessive redhead gene.

Red hair is the rarest natural hair colour in humans. The non-tanning skin associated with red hair may have been advantageous in far-northern climates where sunlight is scarce.  In Asia, genetic red hair is rare, but can be found in the Levant (Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Palestine), inTurkey, in Caucasia, in Northern Kazakhstan, and among Indo-Iranians.

National emblem of Udmurt

A BBC report states that Russia is home to people from at least 190 ethnic groups and counts more than 20 different republics within its borders.  The Udmurts are said to possess the reddest hair in the world. There are Tatars and Bashkirs descendants from the Golden Horde.  The connection between these different ethnicities is that they all have their own republics inside the Russian Federation.  It is stated that between east of Moscow to the Middle Volga lowlands, six of these republics cluster together having their own parliaments to deal with local issues but their governors are appointed by Russia's president to ensure they're subordinate to Moscow in national matters. None of the republics -  Chuvashia, Mari El, Tatarstan, Udmurtia, Mordovia, and Bashkortostan - are exactly new to Russian integration though. 

Their success is perhaps the fact inside Russia they do not feel discriminated against.  – and incidentally, what do you do to hide greying ?

With regards – S. Sampathkumar.

12^th Nov. 2014