Gallery: ginger beard men of Hollywood

We've noticed quite a few Hollywood chaps sporting a crop of ginger whiskers along with a head of brown hair on top.

While you might suspect a dye job, it turns out this is a totally natural anomaly. In fact, you probably know one or two Aussie blokes with the same odd colouring.

Our extensive research (which involved binging 'ginger beard' and seeing what came up) tells us there's a perfectly logical scientific explanation for the ginger whiskers phenomenon...

"Beard hair is quite different to head hair; it is coarser, curlier and doesn't fall out when we get older. Comparatively little work has been done on the genetics of human hair colour, but it is believed that in order to have a ginger beard you must be a carrier for the recessive gene on chromosome 4. With two copies of this gene you will have ginger hair all over, but with just one, the hair on your head will be brown or auburn and your beard will be ginger."

— BBC Focus Magazine, #199 February 2009

Mystery solved!

So which celebrity guys have got a touch of the ginge on their fourth chromosome? Find out in our Ginger beard men gallery...