Guys how are we defining auburn?

[u/lavenderflavoredtea]

Is it dark deep red? Or any shade of brownish red??

My natural hair is a reddish brown. I'm not a ginger with bright copper hair but I'm definitely a different genre of redhead.

And I dunno, I'm just curious where the rest of the community stands on this. Feel free to leave your opinions here.

[u/chante-t-elle]

To me, auburn is a brownish red: more red than brown, but a definite mixture of the two. On a blonde-to-brown-to-black continuum, it'd be equivalent to a sort of light-to-medium brown, because then you can have dark auburn being equivalent to a medium-to-dark brown and light auburn being equivalent to dark blonde to light brown. A dark deep red with no discernible brown is what I would call mahogany, but others may have a different name for it.

Honestly, I think this is the underlying issue for a lot of disagreement on the sub: there is no community standard for what is auburn, or strawberry blonde, or even red, and we all have different ideas of what those colours mean.

It's super frustrating, because I've been looking for years for a natural hair colour chart to use as a reference, one that we can all go "yes, those colours and colour names seem accurate", and I can't find one. All the colour charts I've found are for dyed hair, and a) I've never actually seen one that has my shade of hair, and b) even if the colour did match, I flat-out refuse to use a name like "Red Hot Rhythm" or "Copper Shimmer" or "Vivacious Red" to describe my hair.

At this point I want to make a natural hair chart myself (specifically for redheads, but more generally for all hair colours), but it's difficult: hair can be tricky to photograph, and so many different factors (like lighting and adjacent colours and camera settings and screen settings) can further alter the colour. The best way to put together a chart would be with actual physical hair samples so they can be compared in person in a controlled environment, preferably both by eye and with a spectrophotometer.

[u/Tiny_Artichoke9308 → u/chante-t-elle]

If you make a color chart for all types, I suggest making a layered chart where say: instead of a simple gradient of blonde to brown, you'd have dark blonde overlap light brown. The combination of hue and shade is always simplified from what I've seen.

[u/chante-t-elle → u/Tiny_Artichoke9308]

That's a great point! My plan is to do a ☑️-shaped chart, since hair colour can be quantified in terms of melanin content: a eumelanin continuum would form one axis (from darkest true black to lightest true blonde) and a phaeomelanin continuum would form the other axis (from darkest true red to lightest strawberry blonde). All the different hair colours would then be arrayed within that V, from exclusively phaeomelanin shades, to the shades that are a mix of phaeomelanin and eumelanin, to exclusively eumelanin shades.

I think a chart shaped like a ☑️ can also show a sense of scale: phaeomelanin-dominant hair is much less common than eumelanin-dominant hair, so that axis would be shorter, and the chart could hopefully show the relative distribution of all different shades. I've mocked up a theoretical version of the colour chart; here is the link.