If Terra was meant to have blonde hair...

[rjamlegend]

Terra is also taler than Celes by 2 inches

I feel the game sprites made this quite clear.

Look at the art work too. Terra is nearly as tall as I am ( I am 70 inches, Terra is 68 inches). Celes is 66 inches.

I think the pallette limitation is the best explanation I've heard so far, but there is the fact that blonde hair is seen as very very unusual in Japan. There seems to be some talk that it can even get you stared and pointed at in public. The MC1R hair color gene is not typically present in the indigenous population (in other words, Japanese usually aren't blonde), so it looks exotic and alien sometimes.

Now, Terra may have been given green hair to help out with the pallette choices, but there might have also been some thinking that they wanted to achieve a similar effect to having blonde hair, in a game they hoped would be played by a Western audience.

Put another way, Terra or Celes having blonde hair is as strange and exotic to them as Terra having green hair is to us, perhaps.

Imagine Terra having red hair. The SNES version of Final Fantasy III there is a glitch that changes her hair color to red. Only in battle though. I don't know how it works, and I think in the first half of the game only.

But to answer your query...the color gene is inherited through European population. The native Americans weren't blonde either. Actually, most of the Native Americans came from eastern Asia, Japan, and even the Phillippines during the massive freeze aka the Ice Age. Brown hair, was also uncommon as well. That comes from black hair, being sun bleached to brown. It eventually became genetic, and most of the brown haired people came from South America, and Austrailia.

[G13]Please use the edit feature at the bottom of your post. -G13[/G13]