Around 1 in 4 people in the U.S. have blue eyes. Brown, which is the most common eye color in the world. Green, which is the least common eye color. Only 9% of people in the United States have green 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. Green eyes don't possess a lot of melanin, which creates a Rayleigh scattering effect: Light gets reflected and scattered by the eyes instead of absorbed by pigment.
Gray eye color is one of the loveliest and most uncommon, a trait shared by only 3% of the world's population. The color and intensity of gray eyes varies from person to person and can include dark gray, gray-green and gray-blue.
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.
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.
Conversely, brown eyes are the most common color yet the least attractive to the survey's respondents. According to World Atlas, approximately 79% of the world's population has brown eyes, making it the most common eye color in the world.
The vast majority of people in the world have brown eyes. The second most common color is blue, but people can also have green, gray, amber, or red eyes. Some people have eyes that are different colors than each other.
The second-rarest eye color is hazel, a mixture of brown and green with golden flecks. About 18% of Americans have hazel eyes, compared with about 5% of the world's population.
Another reliable way to tell them apart is by looking at the specks within the iris. Blue eyes often have yellow or gold flecks, while grey eyes typically have brown ones.
If both parents have blue eyes, the children will have blue eyes. The brown eye form of the eye color gene (or allele) is dominant, whereas the blue eye allele is recessive.
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.
Your eyes cannot completely change color like from blue to green or brown to blue when your mood changes. Instead, the size of your pupil changes when your mood changes, and in turn, the hue of your eyes change.
Blonde fact #4: Not all blondes have blue eyes
Lighter tint gives rise to lighter coloured eyes, including blue, but also varying tones of green and grey. So, just because you have blonde hair, it doesn't mean that you have blue eyes too.
Complete heterochromia is definitely rare — fewer than 200,000 Americans have the condition, according to the National Institutes of Health. That's only about six out of every 10,000 people. It's currently unknown how rare central heterochromia is, but we do know that it isn't quite as rare as complete heterochromia.
So, what does it mean if you have blue eyes? Nothing more than that you lack melanin in the first layer of the iris. When light hits that area, it scatters and lets more blue light reflect back out. Fun fact—this scattering effect makes eyes appear blue in the same way that it makes the sky appear blue.
The world of eye color rareness is a fascinating one, with green, amber, gray, hazel, and violet or red eyes being the rarest of them all. These unique colors are a result of a complex interplay between genetic factors and the presence of pigments like melanin or lipochrome in the iris.
Myth: Two blue-eyed parents can't produce a child with brown eyes. Fact: Two blue-eyed parents can have a child with brown eyes, although it's very rare.
Blue Eyes. Originally, all humans had brown eyes. Some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, a genetic mutation affecting one gene turned off the ability to produce enough melanin to color eyes brown causing blue eyes.
It's completely normal to see blue become brown, hazel, or even green as they get a little older. This color transition can take anywhere from a few months to three years to run its course.
True purple eyes are exceedingly rare. Less than 1% of the world's population has them, making them rarer than blue, hazel, amber, grey, or green.
Only 1% of people have pink and pale red eyes; they are typically albinos. Albinism happens when there is a problem with one of the genes inherited from the mother. Like red eyes, heterochromia is rare and effects less than 1% of the population.
"In Australians of European ancestry, the percentage of eye colours are 45 percent blue-grey, 30 percent green-hazel and 25 percent brown. If you're considering non-European ancestry it is the almost completely brown eye colour."
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.
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.