Man Threatens Divorce Over Baby’s Hair Color, Wife Laughs In His Face When Results Come In

Waiting for your child to come into this world is a time full of wonder and anticipation, which often involves trying to guess what the baby is going to look like.

When this redditor gave birth to a blue-eyed bundle of joy with blonde hair, her husband went into shock as both of the parents were brunettes. His wife tried to explain it was genetics at play, but the dad did not want to listen and chose to take a paternity test instead; only to receive an “I told you so” a few weeks later.

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; 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—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, passed down through a person’s DNA, certain gene variations can determine that it differs from that of both the little one’s parents. A child typically receives 46 chromosomes—23 from their mom and as many from dad—which determine their looks. However, sometimes the parents unknowingly carry an unexpressed hair color gene that they can pass to their kid. That’s why sometimes the color of the 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 every year seemingly do, 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.