Filmmaker Gareth Scales, co-organizer of the first Toronto Redhead Summit, thinks a move by the world’s largest sperm bank to avoid the sperm of redheads just makes good economic sense.

The cost of sunscreen can be enormous for the fair and freckled gingers of this world, he reflected Monday.

Ole Schou, director of Denmark-based international sperm bank Cryos, hit a nerve when he tried to explain why they weren’t taking donations from red-haired males any longer.

“Our stock is about to explode,” he told the Star. “We have nothing against red-haired donors. We have just too many in stock in relation to the demand.”

With more than 70 litres of sperm cooling their heels, “we are drowning in semen,” he said. A further 600 donors are on the waiting list.

The demand is for brown-eyed or Mediterranean donors, and non-Scandinavian types, not an easy find in Denmark, Vikings notwithstanding.

It’s a different story in Ireland, where redheads’ sperm goes “like hotcakes.”

“I don’t think it’s malicious,” said Scales, who, like most redheads, suffered his share of anti-ginger malice growing up. “It depends on how public the parents are with the knowledge of donor sperm. They just want to make sure their offspring match.”

The California Cryobank, famous for its celebrity look-alike matching service, offers only five red-haired donors, including a French-Canadian said to look like both Chuck Norris and Jon Cryer.

“We are not doing it intentionally” to limit redheads, said Scott Brown, the California Cryobank director of communications. “We don’t screen for hair colour, eye colour or ethnicity.”

As for the wide range of matches for the celebrity look-alikes, Brown said the idea wasn’t to offer designer sperm; it’s just to give clients a hint about the donor, whose haircut, cheekbones or even dress sense might evoke the famous face.

Scales pointed out that the lack of interest may reflect the fact that male ginger sex symbols are even rarer than everyday gingers, who comprise about 2 per cent of the population.

“There was (television character) Richie Cunningham, but right next to him was the Fonz.”

Then there was the 14-year-old Vancouver boy whose 2008 “National Kick a Ginger Day,” which drew 5,000 Facebook followers, got him investigated by the RCMP.

Scales, 35, and fellow red-haired filmmaker Aaron Champion are working on a documentary about growing up ginger — or gingervitis, as one pro-red site dubbed it.

“There’s a commonality of experience: feeling alienated but feeling unique.”

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Which means he and other redheads this week are cheering for a blue-eyed ginger-furred seal pup abandoned by its mother in Russia and rescued by nature photographer Anatoly Strakhov.

Alas, the forlorn pup with the pink flippers is not a product of a redhead’s sperm. Authorities told Australian media the unusual coat colour was probably the result of an overdose of iron.