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.
What is the rarest eye color? Green is the rarest eye color in the world, with only 2% of the world's population (and fewer than one out of ten Americans) sporting green peepers, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO).
Are They Rare? Grey eyes are one of the rarest eye colors. Less than 3% of the global population has grey eyes. They're most commonly found in people of Northern and Eastern European ancestry.
Close to 3% of the world's population have gray eyes. People with gray eyes have little or no melanin in their irises, but they have more collagen in a part of the eye called the stroma. The light scatters off the collagen in a way that makes the eyes appear gray.
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.
How Rare Are Purple Eyes? People with purple eyes make up less than 1% of the world's population. This means purple, or violet, is truly one of the rarest eye colors across the globe.
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.
Amber eyes are extremely rare. Most sources say that only about 5% of people have true amber eyes. Coming up with a hard and fast number or percentage, though, is not as easy as you might think—there simply haven't been enough large-scale studies done to quantify eye color prevalence with certainty.
The iris has pigmentation that determines the eye color. Irises are classified as being one of six colors: amber, blue, brown, gray, green, hazel, or red. Often confused with hazel eyes, amber eyes tend to be a solid golden or copper color without flecks of blue or green typical of hazel eyes.
Red/Pink Eyes
Two major conditions cause a red or pinkish eye color: albinism and blood leaking into the iris. Although albinos tend to have very, very light blue eyes due to a lack of pigment, some forms of albinism can cause eyes to appear red or pink.
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.
Changes in eye color are rare. Sometimes, the color of your eye may appear to change when your pupils dilate. The colors in your environment, including lighting and your clothes, can give the illusion of eye color change.
African-Americans with blue eyes are not unheard of, but they are pretty rare. There are lots of ways for this to happen. Some possible ways an African-American person might have ended up with blue eyes are: Caucasian relatives in their ancestry (the most likely reason)
While some people may appear to have irises that are black, they don't technically exist. People with black-colored eyes instead have very dark brown eyes that are almost indistinguishable from the pupil. In fact, brown eyes are even the most common eye color in newborn babies.
While common in animals like wolves, cats, and owls, amber-colored eyes in people are incredibly rare. Like green eyes, just 5% of the world's population has them, making them one of the rarest colors in the world.
Silver eye color is rare, although many consider silver eyes to be a variation of blue eye color. Like blue eyes, silver eyes are the result of a very low amount of pigmentation in the eye, which reflects a gray-silver appearance.
In most people, the answer is no. Eye color fully matures in infancy and remains the same for life. But in a small percentage of adults, eye color can naturally become either noticeably darker or lighter with age. What determines eye color is the pigment melanin.
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.
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.
The rarest skin color in the world is believed to be the white from albinism, a genetic mutation that causes a lack of melanin production in the human body. Albinism affects 1 in every 3,000 to 20,000 people.
How common is pink eye? Pink eye is one of the most common eye infections in children and adults. There are about 6 million cases of pink eye in the U.S. each year.
Brown eyes are the most common: Over half the people in the world have them, according to the AAO. In fact, about 10,000 years ago, all humans had brown eyes.
This rare condition only affects about 3% to 7% of people. If you're born with it, your liver doesn't make enough of an enzyme it needs to process bilirubin.