“The Redhead Days is an event organised for all redheads around the world,

Whatever the shade or style, everyone is welcome.”

The Organization

Redhead Day (Roodharigendag in Dutch) is the name of a Dutch summer festival that takes place each first weekend of September in the city of Breda, in the Netherlands. The two-day festival is a gathering of people with natural red hair, but is also focused on art related to the colour red.

Activities during the festival are lectures, workshops and demonstrations which are aimed specifically at red-haired people. The festival attracts attendance from fifty countries and is free of charge due to sponsorship of the local government. To be classified a ‘Redhead’, each participant must not have altered their original, natural hair colour in any way.

The Beginning – 2015

The festival was started in 2005 unintentionally by the Dutch painter Bart Rouwenhorst in the small Dutch city of Asten. As a painter, he was inspired by artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Gustav Klimt. Both of these artists created dramatic portraits of women, and both artists made famous paintings depicting redheaded women.

To follow in the footsteps of his favorite painters, Rouwenhorst planned an exhibition of fifteen new paintings of redheads. Finding models was problematic, since redheads are rare in the Netherlands where only two percent of the population has natural red hair. To find models, an advertisement was placed in a local newspaper. However, instead of 15, 150 models volunteered.

Not wanting to turn down so many potential models, Rouwenhorst decided to choose 14 models, organize a group photo shoot for remaining redheads, and have a lottery to decide by chance who would be the 15th and final model. Thus began the first Redhead Day.

That year, the focus was on red-haired women only, since they were asked to volunteer to pose for the paintings. At the events in later years, the aim was to attract redheaded men as well as women, but still the sexes are not equally distributed. The first meeting attracted 150 natural redheads.

10 years later……Redhead Days 2015 had 40,000 visitors from 80+ countries! 

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