Whether eyes are blue or brown, eye color is determined by genetic traits handed down to children from their parents. A parent's genetic makeup determines the amount of pigment, or melanin, in the iris of the his or her child's eye. With high levels of brown melanin, the eyes look brown.
It is possible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child. Blue eye color is recessive while brown eye color is dominant. So, if the gene for brown eye color is present in the parents' DNA, then it is possible for their child to have brown eyes.
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.
Brown eyes are common in Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Americas. Light or medium-pigmented brown eyes can also be commonly found in South Europe, among the Americas, and parts of Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia.
In the most elementary form, the inheritance of eye color is classified as a Mendelian trait.
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.
Blue is the second most common eye color globally, with an estimated 8 to 10 % of people having blue eyes. A majority of these people are of European descent, however, Black people can be born with blue eyes even though it's pretty rare.
Where in the world are the most green eyes? 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!
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.
More information about Hazel Eyes
Anyone can be born with hazel eyes, but it's most common in people of Brazilian, Middle Eastern, North African, or Spanish descent. When eyes are hazel, they are brown mixed with amber and green. In some cases, there are shades of gray, blue, and gold within the iris too.
Physical features. Physical features such as hair color, hair texture, hairline, skin, and varicose veins are inherited from your mother.
Unlike nuclear DNA, which comes from both parents, mitochondrial DNA comes only from the mother.
If both the parents have brown eyes, then there is generally a 25% chance for their child to have blue eyes. Because both the brown-eyed parents have a recessive blue-eye gene and can pass it to the next generation. However, since eye color is polygenic, several other genes exert their effects as well.
Do grandparents' eye color affect baby? Yes! Grandparents' eye color can also impact baby's eye color. Baby eye color is genetic, and genes pass from generation to generation.
Genes responsible for hair color come from both parents. Although the genes passed down from a child's parents determine hair color, variations can result in a child having a different hair color than both parents.
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.
Brown eyes may have ranked as the least attractive, but they were 1.6 times more likely than blue eyes to be described as trustworthy.
Among the Australian population, green eyes are found in approximately 7% of the people.
People of European descent represent the largest share of those with green eyes. European Americans with Germanic and Celtic ancestry comprise 16% of all green-eyed people. Even though they're most common in Europe, people with green eyes can be found all over the world, even as far as remote parts of China.
The Vikings had various eye colors, although the predominant eye color was blue or gray. However, Irish Vikings had predominantly brown or hazel eyes, and some Viking settlements were much more diverse than others.
Scientists believe that it is possible to trace all blue-eyed people back to a common ancestor, who likely had a genetic mutation that reduced the amount of melanin in the iris. Most people with blue eyes are of European descent.
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.
“The mutations responsible for blue eye colour most likely originate from the north-west part of the Black Sea region, where the great agricultural migration of the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago,” the researchers report in the journal Human Genetics….