Last night, an activist began to persistently call me with information that once again the Roma had kidnapped a fair-haired child and that they urgently needed to call the police, go to the camp and “beat off” the baby, otherwise they would take it apart for spare parts, like a magical amulet, or just for good luck , and, maybe, for fortune-telling. This is not the first time such appeals have taken place, and in all cases this stereotyped information has never been confirmed. For 5 years, almost every week, I have been in the camp (and we have more than 120 of them in Transcarpathia), and often I have to see the descendants of the Aryans with blond hair (at one time I was also very suspicious of this phenomenon and each time I asked to see evidence of the birth of a baby). And over the years, I have accumulated dozens of photographs of fair-haired Roma children in my archive.
In fact, blond children in a Roma family are not so rare.
For some reason, most people are not aware that strong pigmentation occurs over time – hair and skin quickly darken. By the way, there are not at all isolated cases when blond children are born even among those peoples for whom this is not typical (Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards, etc.). In representatives of fair-haired peoples, hair also often darkens with age, but not so much.
There are a lot of complex and unpredictable combinations when a recessive (in this case, blond) gene can joke and “shoot”.