Man Freaks Out Over Baby’s Hair Color, Wife Laughs In His Face When Paternity Test Results Come In

When you're waiting for your child to come into this world, there's a lot of guessing about what they are going to look like.

But after this Redditor gave birth to a blue-eyed bundle of joy with blonde hair, her husband was shocked: how could this be if both parents were brunettes?

The woman tried to explain that it was just genetics playing a trick on them, but her partner didn't listen and chose to take a paternity test instead.

The OP shared that she tried talking some sense into her husband, saying that it was genetics that led to the unexpected color of the baby’s hair. The husband didn’t want to listen, but the Redditor was right: because of our genes that are passed down from generation to generation, children might be born with hair or eye colors the parents didn’t expect.

According to LunaDNA, the color of one’s hair is determined by two types of pigment, eumelanin and pheomelanin; an abundance of the former results in darker, brown or black hair, while the latter colors the hair orange or red. Every person’s hair contains some eumelanin—the darker pigment—low levels of which result in lighter hair, while high levels lead to darker colors.

The fascinating ways our bodies are programmed mean that people with an abundance of tightly packed eumelanin will have black hair, while those with tightly packed pheomelanin will have red hair. (As a matter of fact, the latter is reportedly the rarest hair color in the world, with Ireland and Scotland being the countries where you are most likely to meet individuals with fire-colored hair.) As for blondes, they usually boast a very small and thinly dispersed amount of eumelanin.

Even though hair color is inherited and passed down through a person’s DNA, certain gene variations can determine that it differs from that of both of the little one’s parents. A child typically receives 46 chromosomes—23 from their mom and 23 from their dad—which determine their looks. However, sometimes parents unknowingly carry an unexpressed hair color gene that they can pass to their child. That’s why sometimes the color of a child’s hair differs not only from their parents’, but from their siblings’, too.

For the OP’s husband, such a lack of resemblance was a cause for concern, to such an extent that he even asked for a paternity test. For one reason or another, millions of people seemingly do so every year, as by 2017 the number of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests exceeded 30 million globally.

In the Redditor’s case, the test results proved that what she was saying was the truth; hence, the “I told you so.” And even though she soon started wondering if she was a jerk for uttering these words, fellow Redditors in the comments made sure to let her know that she wasn’t.