Two blue-eyed parents are very likely to have a blue-eyed child, but it won't happen every single time. Two brown-eyed parents are likely (but not guaranteed) to have a child with brown eyes. If you notice one of the grandparents has blue eyes, the chances of having a blue-eyed baby go up a bit.
Your children inherit their eye colors from you and your partner. It's a combination of mom and dad's eye colors – generally, the color is determined by this mix and whether the genes are dominant or recessive. Every child carries two copies of every gene – one comes from mom, and the other comes from dad.
If one biological parent has blue eyes and the other brown, then your child has a 50-50 chance of having permanently blue eyes. If both biological parents have blue eyes, then it's very likely that your child's eyes will be permanently blue.
Fact: Two blue-eyed parents can have a child with brown eyes, although it's very rare. Likewise, two brown-eyed parents can have a child with blue eyes, although this is also uncommon.
Example of a one-gene model for eye color. For two parents with brown eyes to have a blue-eyed child, both parents must genetically be Bb. When this happens, there is a 1 in 4 chance that these parents will have a bb child with blue eyes.
A couple's children can have almost any eye color, even if it does not match those of either parent. Currently it is thought that eye color is determined by about six genes, so you can imagine how inheritance of eye color becomes very complicated.
Both parents have to pass along the blue eye gene in order for their child to have blue eyes. That doesn't necessarily mean that the parents themselves have to have blue eyes; it's possible they carry the gene, but it is recessive. However, a blue-eyed child is almost certain if both parents have blue eyes.
Determining the rarest eye color... not so straightforward
Green is the rarest eye color of the more common colors. Outside of a few exceptions, nearly everyone has eyes that are brown, blue, green or somewhere in between. Other colors like gray or hazel are less common.
How many eye colors are there, and why your shade is unique to you. At some point, you've probably wondered what the rarest eye color is. The answer is green, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO). Only about 2 percent of the world's population sport this shade.
According to an article by evolutionary biology professor Mark Elgar, PhD, of the University of Melbourne, blue-eyed redheads are the absolute rarest, with 0.17% of the population having that combination of hair and eye color.
Genetically, you actually carry more of your mother's genes than your father's. That's because of little organelles that live within your cells, the mitochondria, which you only receive from your mother.
Yes! Grandparents' eye color can also impact baby's eye color. Baby eye color is genetic, and genes pass from generation to generation.
Because boys have the sex chromosomes XY, they must inherit their Y chromosome from their father. This means they inherit all the genes on this chromosome, including things like sperm production and other exclusively male traits.
Unlike nuclear DNA, which comes from both parents, mitochondrial DNA comes only from the mother.
The inheritance of eye color is more complex than originally suspected because multiple genes are involved. While a child's eye color can often be predicted by the eye colors of his or her parents and other relatives, genetic variations sometimes produce unexpected results.
We found that green is the most popular lens colour, with brown coming in a close second, despite it being one of the most common eye colours. Although blue and hazel are seen as the most attractive eye colours for men and women they are surprisingly the least popular.
When broken down by gender, men ranked gray, blue, and green eyes as the most attractive, while women said they were most attracted to green, hazel, and gray eyes. Despite brown eyes ranking at the bottom of our perceived attraction scale, approximately 79% of the world's population sports melanin-rich brown eyes.
Green is considered by some to be the actual rarest eye color in the world, though others would say it's been dethroned by red, violet, and grey eyes.
Did Elizabeth Taylor have violet eyes? These days, thanks to colored contact lenses, anyone can have violet-colored eyes . Taylor didn't come by her purple peepers that way; the first tinted contact lenses weren't commercially available until 1983. Taylor's eye color was the real deal.
The highest concentration of people with green eyes is found in Ireland, Scotland, and northern Europe. In fact, in Ireland and Scotland, more than three-fourths of the population has blue or green eyes – 86 percent! Many factors go into having green eyes.
Unbelievable as it may seem, the answer is yes—natural purple eyes do exist. Purple eyes are also commonly referred to as “violet eyes,” as they are typically a light shade. For most people, this striking eye color can only be achieved with the help of colored contacts.
Blue eyes. This is the next most common eye color, encompassing about 10% of the population. While blue eyes are more sensitive to light during the day, people with blue eyes tend to see better at night – unless there are bright lights.
There are plenty of blue-eyed Asians. This probably happens when the traditional blue-eyed allele comes into a family from a (possibly very distant) European ancestor. Blue eyes then resurface in a child generations later if they inherit the allele from both parents.
Recessive Traits
In order for these traits to show outwardly, a person needs to have inherited two recessive genes—one from each parent. Typical recessive traits are tallness, blonde hair, and blue eyes.