Even traditionally Japanese anime characters can have hair of any color, even colors that don't traditionally appear on any real human! Like with manga
Manga are comics or graphic novels created in Japan or by creators in the Japanese language, conforming to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century. They have a long and complex pre-history in earlier Japanese art.
In contrast to SingerOfTheFall, Hakase, and Blue's claims that the reason characters tend to have crazy hair colors is to be cool, unique, paid more attention to, and easier to remember/differentiate, "crazy" colors were not invented in order to distinguish characters from each other.
Simply put, the brightness of a character’s hair communicates how down-to-earth and otherworldly a character is. The darker a color, the more that character lives in the here and now – and the brighter, the more esoteric, distant, magical and surreal he/she is… With the extreme version of that trope,...
She was “someone special”. When an anime character was given silver/white hair, he/she was almost other-worldly in nature, someone who is mentally as elusive and hard to pin down as water or air. When an anime character had bold, red hair, the color reflected a high-energy, over-confident, brash, abrasive personality.
Anime Hair is very common among protagonists of anime/manga for the Shonen (Demographic), although the trend seems to be headed to more plausible styles: compare Son Goku's hair to Ichigo's. If there's a White-Haired Pretty Boy in the cast, there's a good chance that white hair will also be Anime Hair. Now, compare this Vash picture:
One important aspect of anime characters is their hair colour. Some characters have crazy hair colours that we don't see everyday in real life. A character's hair colour can actually say a lot about their personality and give us hints about their character, especially when we're forming our first impression about them.
Both male and female characters have orange hair in anime. What is important to know is that this anime hair color is very similar to the above-analyzed red when character traits are concerned.
Hair color is frequently used in Japanese anime to differentiate between characters. While not always consistent, there is a connection between hair color and character personalities in anime. Blond hair, usually with blue eyes, could have been used to show someone is special or superior.
Green hair represents the cycle of reproduction and change. Greens also tend to be rejuvenating characters: healers. Yellows are also rejuvenating characters, but they tend to focus on the emotions while greens heal the body.
While there have been a handful of anime that draw pubic hair on women (and an even smaller number that do so on men), anime characters are, by and large, body hair-free. The original reasons for this, of course, have to do with Japanese censorship laws.
It is more common in Anime, but it can happen in any style. It might be just how the art style is, or the character might literally be lacking a nose. This noselessness is a favorite target of a Stylistic Self-Parody.
Red HairRed Hair. Red hair is the rarest natural hair color. Experts estimate that somewhere between 1-2% of the world's population has red hair.
Naruto's hair is blond because his father's hair was blond. However, what if he was born with the same hair color as his mother? That would be an interesting sight. The Fourth Hokage, also known as Minato Namikaze, had a relationship with Kushina Uzumaki, and from that union came Naruto Uzumaki.
Blonde people are pretty exotic in Japan, since they're the caucasians that look most drastically different from an Asian, and their light skin plays into centuries-old Asian preferences for lighter skin tone (which comes from the idea that rich people don't have to work in the fields, and therefore don't get as tanned ...
What isstill somewhat common, however, is characters with lighter/paler shades of purple. These almost always come with long, flowing hair and typically signify some sort of detached, noble, cultured, dainty, often even mysterious, “fantasy princess” archetype.
Red hair is associated with a temper or an outgoing personality. That core idea exported into anime. Red heads are full of raw energy and often associated with fire. Red heads are resilient; they seek to survive at all costs.
Just a decade ago, no one would ever have believed they would see this. The natural hair color for Japanese people is generally black, of course. Long, black hair was a sign of beauty for women in the Heian period (794-1192), when Japan developed its own cultural preferences.
If we had to, on the other hand, we would say that brown-haired anime characters are generally approachable, comfortable, charming, consistent, sincere and enduring. These are all relatively normal traits and they are something which you would expect from a normal human being or a protagonist of a certain show.
The closest color to black, in meaning, is dark blue.
This word itself describes a person who is attracted to fictional characters wearing eyeglasses or, in this case, pink-haired anime characters. Pink-haired girls have become the moe of a whole generation of anime fans and pink hair has since become a popularity brand and is more common in modern-day anime.
Males, on the other hand, tend to be different. Green-haired male characters don’t usually have a high opinion of themselves and tend to be more troublesome. The good thing about green-haired characters is that, despite everything, they’ll usually side with the good guys and are generally not evil.
On a general level, blue-haired characters are usually special in one way or the other and in fantastical settings, they usually have some special abilities. Their personalities range from cute to calculated, but they are rarely on the team of evil in the world of anime.
Brown (茶色 chairo) Taichi Yagami from Digimon is a great example of the protagonist-type of character usually associated with brown hair. Brown is a color that has become more popular in Japan in recent years, as many Japanese people dye their hair brown.
Green is not so common on the streets and that is also something that is translated to anime panels. Alongside the almost mythological sky blue, green is among the rarest colors in the world of anime. This is also one of the colors which has a large difference between female and male characters.
In contrast to SingerOfTheFall, Hakase, and Blue's claims that the reason characters tend to have crazy hair colors is to be cool, unique, paid more attention to, and easier to remember/differentiate, "crazy" colors were not invented in order to distinguish characters from each other.
Most anime characters have spikey hair because it's a trademark in anime. And not all anime characters have spikey hair, for example, Lee, Orochimaru, Katara, and many others. Many say that most anime characters have bangs because if they don't they'll have a big forehead. Vegeta.
Spiky hair is a common character design in anime and manga (though there are many series in which this is not featured).
The canon hair colors seem to be: Kitajima Maya: reddish-brown, Himekawa Ayumi: blonde, Hayami Masumi: light purple. Maya, Ayumi, and Masumi illustrated with every hair color under the sun, not intended to be interpreted by the readers as their actual hair colors:
This is more of an art question. The reason why character tend to have crazy hair colors and styles is to make them different from the rest of the characters. Not just in that particular anime or manga, but in the real world too. If you take a silhouette of Goku, you can tell its Goku due to his hair style.
As a result, each of the anime adaptions used different hair colors in attempts to match Miuchi-sensei's intended canon colors.
The origin of this practice is the primarily black and white medium of manga. Manga pages are printed in black and white, so almost all of the art that mangaka (manga artists) draw is black and white (this is much cheaper for the publishers than if they had to print all the pages in color).