Signal Received
June 16, 2022
On the subject of ostentatious hair colouring, Emil Kirkegaard has some thoughts:
For those not into memes: the idea is that poisonous animals advertise their dangerousness by [using] bright colours to scare away predators. Humans appear to do the same, as those who are poisonous -- mentally ill -- colour their hair in bright, dangerous-looking colours. Since this meme was made in about 2014, we’ve seen a strong increase in the number of people with unnatural hair colours. In the same time, we have seen a rise in mental illness in left-wingers…
Is unnatural hair colour associated with mental illness, or are we being misled by a few prominent people with this hair style who appear very mentally ill? We decided to find out using the venerable OKCupid dataset.
Charts and number-crunching ensue.
The full paper - Blue Hair and the Blues: Dying Your Hair Unnatural Colours is Associated with Depression - can be downloaded here.