"Beauty Gene": Redheads as endangered species

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week is the series "The Beautiful Gene" by Italian Marina Rosso, who learned that red-haired donors are the least popular among clients of sperm banks, and decided to reflect this fact with the help of art.

In September 2011, the world's largest sperm bank temporarily stopped taking material from red-haired donors: the demand for it was markedly lower than the supply. At the moment, half the clients of all sperm banks are single women, and they seek to select for themselves the genetic "ideal prince". That is, the number of children consciously conceived in the pursuit of some personal idea of the ideal will grow in the world - this is what modern philosophy calls new eugenics.

As it turned out, most women’s personal perceptions of beauty very rarely include red hair. After centuries of discrimination, ridicule, and even persecution, red-haired people suddenly fall victim to an unspoken conspiracy: does it really happen that with the help of sterile clinics, frozen semen and online questionnaires, they will slowly disappear from the face of the earth? Deciding to challenge this system, I spoke on behalf of conservative genetics: in order to preserve the diversity of species in the world, for the beginning it is necessary to make a classification of all their possible genetic variations.

For the project, I studied a huge number of sites spermobankov. In almost all cases, you can choose a donor online for a number of characteristics. It is these characteristics that formed the basis of the matrix I created. Of course, this is just a rough example of the diversity of human features that exist in nature, but I wanted to get the impression of an anthropological catalog. I began by compiling a tablet showing 48 variations with the redhead gene, that is, combining it with five other physical features: gender, age, body build, eye color, and hair type. And then went to look for real people who fit the resulting types.

In order to choose the heroes for the project, I made a list of all the conventions of red-haired people and went to each. Then she just began to approach the red-haired passers-by on the streets. So among my heroes are people from all over Europe, there are a couple of Americans and one Canadian.