Less than 3% of the global population has grey eyes. They're most commonly found in people of Northern and Eastern European ancestry. Like all eye colors, they're a product of the amount of melanin in the iris.
Those with grey eyes have little melanin on their irises but a lot of collagen that reflects light and makes the iris look gray. Gray eyes refer to an iris that contains a shade of gray color. It is such a rare occurrence that only about 3 percent of the world's population has gray eyes.
Gray eyes are neither recessive nor dominant. Scientists used to think that a person's eye color was caused by one dominant gene, and that brown eyes were dominant while lighter eyes (blue, green, hazel and gray) were recessive. A recessive gene only shows up when there are two copies of it present.
Babies whose heritage is dark-skinned are usually born with brown eyes, whereas Caucasian newborns tend to be born with blue or gray eyes. Since melanocytes respond to light, at birth a baby may have eyes that appear gray or blue mostly due to the lack of pigment and because he's been in a dark womb up until now.
Gray eyes may be called “blue” at first glance, but they tend to have flecks of gold and brown. And they may appear to “change color” from gray to blue to green depending on clothing, lighting, and mood (which may change the size of the pupil, compressing the colors of the iris).
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One of the study's main findings was that gray eyes are both the rarest and the statistically most attractive eye color, with hazel and green following closely behind. Conversely, brown eyes are the most common color yet the least attractive to the survey's respondents.
Their low melanin content is similar, but in fact, gray irises are significantly more rare than standard blue eyes. If you look closely, you might even spot streaks of brown, amber and gold within the gray. Even less common is a condition called heterochromia — different colored eyes.
Green eyes are rarer than gray eyes, but only by 1%. Around 3% of the world's population has gray eyes. Like blue eyes, gray eyes are caused by a lack of melanin in the iris.
Most redheads have blue, grey, green or hazel eyes; true brown eyes are not common with red hair.
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.
There's a little genetic tweak that makes the combination of red hair and blue eyes the rarest of them all. The same Nature study mentioned above found that another gene variant, HERC2, interacts with both the MC1R gene and the OCA2 gene—and it can shut off the redhead gene while expressing blue eyes and blonde hair.
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.
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.
Each parent will pass one copy of their eye color gene to their child. In this case, the mom will always pass B and the dad will always pass b. This means all of their kids will be Bb and have brown eyes. Each child will show the mom's dominant trait.
Generally speaking, patients with lighter color irises, such as blue or gray, experience more light sensitivity than someone with brown eyes. The density of pigment in light eyes is less than that of a darker colored iris. When light hits a dark-colored iris, the higher density in pigment blocks the light rays.
Of those four, green is the rarest. It shows up in about 9% of Americans but only 2% of the world's population. Hazel/amber is the next rarest of these. Blue is the second most common and brown tops the list with 45% of the U.S. population and possibly almost 80% worldwide.
Gray is the second-rarest natural eye color after green, with 3% of the world's population having it.
Likewise, two brown-eyed parents can have a child with blue eyes, although this is also uncommon.
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.
Yes, natural purple eyes are possible. There are many different shades of blues and greys out there and many in-between colors. Although very rare, some people's natural pigmentation can even be violet or purple in color.
The real answer: They were not purple at all, but a vibrant dark blue. Her eyes merely appeared to be purple when exposed to certain lighting, makeup, or clothing (and plenty of retouching of her images, we're sure!).
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.
5–Black Eyes
There's an eye disorder known as aniridia which makes the eye appear to have “no iris.” In truth, there is a small ring of iris tissue but it is so small and the pupil is so large that it can look like the eyes are completely black. It is due to a chromosome mutation.