So I met this model you can see on my portfolio who's got a beautiful pale skin. It's an advantage, but red haired people have a different skin tone due to their lack of yellow melanin ; hence, their skin is a reddish tone instead of an orange one in other humans. So color temp might have a different influence of skintone rendering, right ?
We shot at her place with daylight and gels on a strobe ; I set my camera's CT on 'shade' so daylit parts didn't have an unpleasant, 'cold' tone to them, and the blue gel-lit ones neither had. Well that's my feeling, but OC critics are welcome

I wonder, though, how I could get this beautiful alabaster skintone, especially in a strobes-only lighting scenario. My gels are random ones from Ebay, not real color-correcting ones like the Wratten. I guess there's some color-correcting trick to lighten up this pale reddish skintone to achive the result I'm after ?

My tips for shooting redheads are to firstly stay far enough away from 'em that they cain't easily take a awing at ya if they don't like the immediate results of your labours  .  .  .  then wait until they've left the studio to share quick edits, so they can't erase all your hard work afore ya get it to a more finished state  .  .  .  finally, make sure you've gotten plenty of positive feedback from the viewing public on the final images, so she's less likely to jest dismiss them as total trash  .  .  .    Sorry, all silly cliches, I couldn't resist  .  .  .  I've shot with a lot of fair skinned, freckled models, typically I light and shoot them as I would any other model, although I do try and make the lighting fall to the cooler side if it's controllable, outside, I just shoot as I would normally and then "cool" the images down a bit in post, tone down the "warm", and add in some "cool", reduce the red and yellow saturation a bit, and usually up the cool side of the white balance a touch  .  .  .  much continued success!



Miss M (although not a redhead per se), is fair skinned and freckled, and wonderful to work with!

SOS

Thank you for the tips ! I have to admit I never heard of the clichés you mention ; here in France there are few clichés about them. My model is really nice, that is.
Yeah Miss M looks great, she's what I call a 'blonde redhead', or a 'redhead-skinned blonde'. There are also brunettes with that type of skin, freckles and raspberry-colored lips. Really beautiful, but there are none around here.

If you are shooting raw files, you should be good.  Just move the sliders (hue, saturation, exposure, contrast, levels/curves, etc.) around  to taste, in your photo editing software.

Of course, shoot manual exposure and try to maintain the same camera settings throughout a series of shots.  If you can also grab a shot of a grey/white card with those same settings and the same lighting, it could help later when editing.

What was the purpose of using gels on the strobe(s)?

By the way, most gel brands have CTO (Color Temperature Orange) and CTB (Color Temperature Blue) correction gels in various grades (1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and full).  These color temperature adjusting gels are accurate enough for most lighting purposes.

Here's a frame of a redhead that was shot with an unfiltered Dynalight 804 II strobe:



I don't recall the color grade adjustments, but I didn't do much more than move a few sliders.  The MUA went for the "shiny" look, which I did try to minimize in post.

If you look at my portfolio, you'll see several redheads, taken outdoors, mostly in indirect light, one in direct incandescent. No gels, with very little, if any, post-processing. Shoot in RAW, be aware of surrounding light temperature and, if needed, use software sliders. And all were easy to work with.

My Avatar photo was taken remotely,  by me in NYC, of the model in the UK, with me in control of her camera, with window light. She is fabulous to work with.

Redhead, open shade

Thank you for your replies. I was after a gel colored style shooting , a 'red light' mood, a 'blue morning' one and a golden one that turned out just stupid yellow. I usually shoot outdoors, but now I found a studio which means accurate light control.
I did try the advice I was given here, it worked great and did get me this fascinating, almost glowing skintone before Rawtherapee crashed
Yet I'm a bit confused, between old fashioned gels and film (why not shoot both film and digital ?) and insanely powerful digital sliders. I need to review my notes.
Yes I should have hade a grey chart with me. For this time, I used the shutters as a reference as they are *ahem* grey and played with the magic sliders.

I work with quite a few very pale-skinned models due to my location in the Pacific Northwest of the USA.  I've tried things like gold umbrellas and gels to give them just a touch of color, but haven't found any technique I really like.

One thing that does seem to help is to underexpose the RAW images slightly, so that their bright skin isn't blown out.  I tend to look at the histogram a lot.

In Lightroom I sometimes increase the orange saturation a bit.  But sometimes I just accept the porcelain skin tone.

You are over thinking it. Photographing red heads is no different than photographing any other caucasian person all you have to do is know how to use kelvin white balance on your camera. I have shot so many natural red heads and I have done the exact same thing as when I photograph anyone else there isn't some secret formula. 

When I saw the topic, I thought it referred to using a particular kind of hot light that was called a redhead (the one I remember were actually painted red, too). I don't know if they are still available (I looked - apparently they are). They were never a particularly good light for portrait photography, though, because they were notoriously hot.

I would use a color checker card instead of just a gray card to properly be able to correct white balance and get true colors for hair and skin in post.

Aesthetically Most want to play up and intensify the red hue of the model’s hair however you want to correct ruddiness and reds in he skin. I would suggest masking the hair in layers so you can bring up the color saturation of the hair while toning down and correcting ruddiness in the complexion.

When working with redheads, I try to keep a few things in mind.
For shooting, camera set to daylight/flash, use cool tone accessories
and backgrounds. There is a reason many are shown wearing
cyan/blue undies. Shoot RAW.

In post, I sneak the white balance up about 1k, don't give into
the temptation to crank the saturation, instead finesse the cool
tones hue and saturation.

I always take a couple of test shots, load those into a laptop and see where I'm at first.

Color correction is probably better done using software than gels and other light modifiers.
You have more and more subtle options with software. If a gel isn't providing the results you want, it isn't going to change.

My most recent shoot was with a redhead and I used window light for a many of our images.
I don't put anything over the front of the lens unless I absolutely have to, which is mostly never.