Thousands of redheads celebrate their strands at festival in Netherlands

The southern Dutch city of Tilburg is seeing more color than usual this weekend, as thousands of redheads from all over the world gather in the Netherlands for a once-a-year festival to celebrate their flaming locks. The 2025 edition of the Redhead Days festival includes music, food trucks and workshops tailored to particular needs of redheads, from makeup explainers to skin cancer prevention. Organizers expect the three-day event to draw several thousand attendees from some 80 countries.The festival is free and open to all, with the exception of the group photo on Sunday August 31,2025. That event is restricted to “natural” redheads. The 2013 edition set a Guinness World Record for the “largest gathering of people with natural red hair” with 1,672 people posing for the group photo. The tradition emerged two decades ago when Dutch artist Bart Rouwenhorst put out a call for 15 red-haired models for an art project in a local newspaper. He got ten times the response he was expecting and brought the group together for a photo.