A Gathering of The Red
Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2013 10:36 pm
More than a thousand redheads packed Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland Saturday, hoping to break a Guinness World Record.
Organizers won't know if they made the grade for another two to three months, but unofficial counts clocked in between 1,300 and 1,600 redheads at the Portland Redhead Event.
If those numbers hold, Portland will have topped the previous record, set last year when 1,255 redheads gathered in Breda, Netherlands.
Only natural redheads were let in -- no bottle gingers allowed. But the crowd was a diverse mix of people from across the country for the event, which raised money for skin cancer research.
Deb Doonan traveled from Mount Prospect, Ill., to attend the ginger gathering. She marveled at the sight of so many redheads.
"You see quite a few of them here," Doonan said, "which is unusual. Except at weddings and funerals in my family," she joked.
Roughly one percent of the world's population is thought to have red hair, with United States ginger saturation pegged between 2 and 6 percent of the population. It's even rare in Ireland and Scotland, where the BBC reported in 2000 that 10 percent of residents were redheads.