Hair thickness / shovel-shaped incisors

EDAR shapes hair, teeth and sweat glands during development. A variant common in East Asians produces thicker, straighter hair and shovel-shaped front teeth.

Possible results

Finer hair type. You have the ancestral version of EDAR, so you have the more common, finer hair texture and typical tooth shape. The thick-hair EDAR variant is rare outside East Asia and the Americas.

Intermediate hair type. You carry one copy of the EDAR variant that's common in East Asia. It can give slightly thicker, straighter hair and subtle tooth-shape differences, though one copy has a milder effect than two.

Thick hair, shovel teeth. You have two copies of the EDAR variant common in East Asia, which typically gives thick, straight hair and shovel-shaped front teeth (a slight scoop on the back of the upper incisors). The same gene also tweaks sweat-gland density.

Evidence & sources

Across global populations, about 3% of people carry two copies of this variant, and about 93% carry none.

This variant appears in 3 published genetic studies: PubMed 26926045 · PubMed 27487801 · PubMed 29895819.

Related

Earwax type / body odor · Endurance / aerobic capacity (PPARGC1A) · Eye color (blue, green/hazel, brown) · Height · Male-pattern baldness tendency · Muscle fiber type (power vs endurance) · Skin pigmentation (light vs dark)