Two Percent of Everything

Redheads are roughly two percent of the world’s population—always have been, probably always will be, given how the genetics work. Two percent. Children’s literature oddly overcorrects: Pippi Longstocking, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, Anne Shirley of Green Gables—fictional redheads appear with a frequency suggesting writers felt the universe owed them some compensation for real-world scarcity. Medieval Europe burned them as witches. Hitler, in one of his more specific paranoias, banned two redheads from marrying each other, apparently convinced their offspring would destabilize whatever he’d decided was the correct gene pool. And direct sunlight—just an ordinary Tuesday afternoon—can make their hair look briefly extraordinary and immediately damage the skin beneath it. The universe has decided this color needs enemies.

So I notice redheads. It would be strange not to.

Nataliya Pirozhkova is twenty-one and Ukrainian and I’ve been staring at photographs of her for weeks. She’s walked for Elie Saab, Naeem Khan, and Strenesse, appeared in editorial shoots for Vanity Fair, Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar, and picked up advertising work for L’Oreal, among others. None of that explains why she keeps stopping me. The hair is that specific copper that reads differently in every light—warm one moment, almost orange the next, then something closer to amber in the shade. The blue eyes are what make the whole thing aggressive. Together they create a contrast that seems almost engineered to catch attention.

She’s the first entry in a recurring thing I want to do here. Two percent of the world. I’m not letting them go unacknowledged.