“Just as with skin, the colour of hair is determined by the amount of melanin in the outer layer (cortex) of each hair. Melanin is a protein that has colour. Black hair has the greatest amount of melanin. White hair has no melanin. Hair gets its colour from the two types of melanin that create the variety of hair colors we see. Eumelanin (sometimes called black / brown melanin) is the darkest melanin and the most commonly found in humans. Phaeomelanin (sometimes called red melanin) is the lighter melanin. One’s hair color is the ratio of eumelanin to phaeomelanin. A high amount of eumelanin with little phaeomelanin results in black or brown hair. As the ratio of eumelanin to phaeomelanin lessens, the result is red, ginger, and blonde hair. This ratio varies enormously among humans. This is why everyone’s hair is just a little different… Melanin also varies in the hair of different parts of the body. This is why pubic hair is sometimes a slightly different colour from hair elsewhere. The absence of melanin later in life causes white hair. White hair may appear on some parts of the body before others because there is variation in this too.” — The Register (UK)

There used to be a time when the human body was a sort of foreign country. A hundred and fifty years ago, the only pornography you were likely to see was on a Greek vase at an art museum. There is a story about the 19th century art critic John Ruskin that, the first time he saw his fiancé naked, he was mortified by the sight of pubic hair on her body. Somehow he’d gotten so accustomed to all those “bare down there” statues that he didn’t realize his bride, like himself, would have pubic hair.

Nowadays it’s different. Odds are some of your earliest memories may include glimpses of pornography — a Playboy magazine found under a bed, an uncle’s Penthouse or Hustler. When you were a kid, you would find one of these things and view it with a strange, panting wonder. They were exciting, even if you didn’t understand why, but they were also very mysterious. Differences in the color of pubic hair would have been precisely the type of thing to set you wondering. Why were all those blonde babes endowed with pubes the color of raccoon fur? Did they dye their hair? Probably. But if not, why was one location light and the other dark? It was almost symbolic, as though the dark pubes suggested the hiddenness of the organs they accompanied.

But now you know it’s all just a matter of chemistry. The head has its palette of melanin and the pubes have theirs. The mysteries of the body seem to be cleared up through good science, and yet good science leaves in its wake a body that just doesn’t seem as whole as it once did. It’s like discovering that one leg can be shorter than the other. Entirely separate chemical regimes govern different parts of your appearance. It almost makes you wonder if they can get totally out of sync, so that one day you wake up with white hair and blue pubes, or perhaps with a bush that resembles the fright wig of a clown.

VideoBox

It's like the iTunes Music Store for Porn. Download unlimited high-quality video for only $9.95/month.