The Burning Minority
Redheads are statistically disappearing. I’ve read this enough times that it’s practically become ambient noise, trotted out whenever someone needs a fact that sounds more dramatic than it is. What I’ve never believed is that it matters—because the ones who exist right now are, almost uniformly, doing something interesting with the distinction. There’s a type. Creative, slightly unhinged, operating on some frequency the rest of us can only approximate. I’ve been half-obsessed with them for years.
Rockie Nolan is nineteen and from Texas and instead of sleeping she stays up manipulating photographs in Photoshop until they’re exactly what she wants. That’s the detail that matters. Not the age, not the origin—the insomnia with a purpose. Her photography has that classical-era fixation that reads as anachronistic online but lands differently when you actually look at it. She’s been writing and shooting at The Wanderlusters and everywhere else the internet touches.
Filippa Smeds is the face of the Nordic Radar Magazine and one of the more recognizable names in Scandinavian fashion blogging—twenty-one, Swedish, with a blog called Gillo Filippa where she writes about Nintendo and parties and apparently love, in that order. Somewhere in Buenos Aires, two Argentine women built her a dedicated Facebook fan page and fill it with old photos and quotes. That’s a specific kind of minor fame, the best kind.
Teresa Buecker is the one I’d actually want to read. The description that stuck with me: a woman who writes extravagantly about Russian divers, fashion performances, and one-night stands—and can pivot between saccharine and brutal without warning. She’s been published in Der Freitag, the German weekly known for cultural criticism, and once gave a talk at the re:publica conference in Berlin on the global evolution of love. Whatever that turns into as a lecture, I want the transcript.
Alexandra Sim-Wise crossed over from FHM and Playboy photo spreads into writing columns about Pokémon and first-person shooters, which is a trajectory I find genuinely more interesting than the modeling work. Her position on the Mario-versus-Sonic debate is unambiguous: Sonic wins, because he’s faster and blue and has spines, and the fat plumber never had a chance. This is the correct take.
Maria Eugenia Elias Gonzales is nineteen, Spanish, and the post describes her as the platonic ideal of a fashion victim—groupie affect, cigarettes, dating the frontman of a Spanish indie band called Zenttric. But then the hobby is baking and roller skating, which collapses the whole image pleasantly. She was documenting the contradiction on her blog, modeling work alongside private snapshots. The mix of careless cool and domestic comfort is more interesting than either half alone.
Eva Schulz has been writing her Hurra! Blog for five years at this point, which at nineteen means she started when she was fourteen, which tells you something about commitment and something else about the internet in 2005. She hates chocolate because of its fundamental uncertainty—you never know what you’re getting, and then you’ve spent the calories. I understand this as a worldview. It applies to more things than chocolate.
Katrin Isabel goes by Kate Holy online and describes herself, or gets described, as coming directly from hell and working in something design-related. Her Tumblr features photos of redheads, accounts of carsick road trips, and self-portraits in a childhood bedroom with Hello Kitty. She can consume alcohol in quantities that would floor most people, but a single energy drink turns her sleepless and frantic for days. There is probably a metaphor in that but I’m not going to reach for it.
Tahti Syrjala is Finnish, nineteen, studying to become a makeup artist in Ireland, and listening to Bad Religion, Johnny Cash, and Ella Fitzgerald in some rotating combination that I find both eclectic and completely coherent. Her other defining characteristic is an intense enthusiasm for tuna, which she makes into fish cakes. The range of that playlist, the specificity of that food preference—she seems like someone worth paying attention to.
Kath Purkis is twenty-four and Australian, and her label Le Black Book had already landed in most of the major fashion magazines before she was twenty-five. She trained under Akira Isogawa, the Sydney-based Japanese designer known for his textile work, which explains something about the precision of what she’s built independently. Awards plural, before the age that most people have figured out what they’re doing.
Traci Lynn Matlock is thirty-three—the oldest on this list by a decade—a photographer and artist from Texas who occasionally publishes uncensored self-portraits on her blog, The Noumenon Revelation. She drives long distances through the state alone. She just bought a new car for it. There’s something about that image I keep returning to: the long flat roads, the red hair, the camera, the deliberate refusal to act her age—or anyone’s idea of what her age should look like.
Taken together they make a case that has nothing to do with hair pigmentation and everything to do with a certain refusal to be decorative and nothing else. Each one is doing at least two things at once. That, more than the genetics, is what I keep noticing.