The really important questions: Gnomish hair colour?

Lore Story
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Mechagnomes bring up a very important question: What kinds of hair colours are natural to gnomes?

We all have seen pink-haired and green-haired gnomes since the game’s inception, and many of us thought that this was their natural state. Maybe it was some kind of pigment that gnomes produce and other races don’t, maybe it was their natural colourfulness looking for an outlet in the world and finding the hair, but it whatever it was, it was good.

Then on one dark day the Mechngomes came and brought this common knowledge, integral to our understanding of the workings of the world, in question. Here there are gnomes, just normal gnomes, only 500 years removed from our own playable race and… no pink hair. No green hair. But…blonde hair?

This baffling revelation didn’t come with any kind of explanation and so we have to ask ourselves: What is the truth about gnomish hair colours? Do our gnomes just dye their hair garishly, and we never knew it? Is it some sort of social statement? Are Mechagnomes ashamed of their colourful selves, and hide behind hair dyes? Were 500 years apart enough to make the different groups of gnomes diverge in such central ways?

We need answers, my friends!

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They dye it to protest against Human_Potential™

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Its a good question, and some of the possibilities you list, do they dye their hair in odd colours? Possibly, there is a precedent for a race doing that, many Blood Elves apparently dye their hair, vividly red, not auburn/ginger like Liadrin, but actual Red, out of patriotism/remembrance of the fallen.

My headcanon, as in there is nothing to back this up, is that the sectors of Gnomeregan may have been ‘colour coded’ in the same way as say, the tube lines on the London Underground, so Gnome’s dying their hair a certain colour might be a way of remembering their ‘Sector’ after the Fall of the City. Mechagnomes would never have experienced this, and wouldn’t dye their hair, perhaps -theirs- is the natural colour after all…

As I say, that’s just my fanciful idea…

500 years -is- enough time for humans to develop different hair colouration, but not for a longer lived species like gnomes (Apparently they’re similar to Dwarves and live about 300 years or so?)

Garishly pink hair can be cool, not during your tragically Goth days in your 20’s when your girlfriend dyes your hair that colour in your sleep however. I mean I was impressed she managed to do it without waking me. My Boss? Not so impressed, I was a Mortgage advisor at the time…

Another bit of personal headcanon; Why are gnomes and goblins commonly regarded as the masters of Engineering, why are their inventions so hard to understand, and their calculations so difficult that other races have to specifically learn their way of thinking?

Simples… Humans, Elves, Forsaken all that, think the way we do, Decimal, because we have ten digits on our hands, it makes sense, we think and calculate, in terms of 10’s. Ten '1’s make Ten, Ten '10’s make One Hundred, Ten '100’s make a Thousand, and so on, so on, right up to a Thousand thousand making a Million.

Gnomes and Goblins however, both have only eight digits on both hands, so likely their maths and as such Engineering calculations would be wildly different. Eight '1’s make an Eight, Eight ‘8’s’ make a 64, Eight '64’s make a 512 (I had to use a calculator for that one, admittedly) and that’s why the Other Races just don’t understand the schematics as well and have to be taught. They have to learn to not think in Decimal, but in Octal, which after a quick google search looks confusing as heck!

But as I say, that’s just my theory…

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That would actually be kind of fun, too.

And better than tinting your eyes after losing your tree or well, I guess…

It’s very easy to convert octal numbers into binary numbers, and vice versa, though. And since we all know the “language” of complex machines is mostly expressed through binary code, there might actually be something to it helping in their dealings with machines… and confusing other races.

Not that the gnomish intellect isn’t superior enough without little tricks like this…

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The folks at Mechagon were actually exiled for being a lower form of gnomes who cant have pink or green hair. This is to setup their grudge against Ally gnomes and thus their role as a future Horde allied race

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Nice try, but the King Mechagon voluntary left with his followers to find this promised gnomish paradise land. :wink:

It’s still odd that this is how gnomes became a “democracy”, the King just up and left.

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Please, never ask Blizzard for an explanation on that one… I really don’t want to hear Blizzard’s take on that, ever…

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Dw, they’ll ignore it to death.

Just like how they ignore people that ask for an explenation why the night elves joined the Alliance.

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My guess is that they may be washing their hair with water contaminated by metal, as doing so will change the colour of one’s hair (especially if it was originally a light colour like blonde!)

Maybe their infrastructural engineering systems still need a little bit of improvement after they’ve been busy focusing on other projects, or maybe gnomes biologically need to consume metals in their water or something. Maybe they just dilute their personally favourite metals into their shower water and that’s what the hair colours mean. Plenty of possibilities really :grinning:

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Maybe they just dye their color pink/green because they like it? I mean, some people do it irl so it’s not impossible.

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