The rarest eye color in the world is likely violet or red—and yes, those colors can occur without the help of contacts. Many factors can influence eye color, including genetics and even certain medical conditions.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
According to the World Atlas, only about 5% of the world's population has hazel eyes, making them extremely uncommon, yet they are NOT becoming more rare. Meanwhile, blue eyes account for about 8 to 10% of the world population whereas brown eyes dominate at a whopping 79%.
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.
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.
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. What is this? People with albinism usually have very pale or colorless skin, hair, and eyes.
Heterochromia is when a person has differently colored eyes or eyes that have more than one color. Most of the time, it doesn't cause any problems. It's often just a quirk caused by genes passed down from your parents or by something that happened when your eyes were forming.
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.
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.
People who had deep brown eyes during their youth and adulthood may experience a lightening of their eye pigment as they enter middle age, giving them hazel eyes.
“Can two parents with blue eyes have a child with brown eyes?” Yes, blue-eyed parents can definitely have a child with brown eyes.
Eye color doesn't significantly affect the sharpness of your vision, but it can affect visual comfort in certain situations. It all comes down to the density of the pigment melanin within your iris, which determines what colors of light are absorbed or reflected.
Eye colour, or more correctly iris colour, is often used as an example for teaching Mendelian genetics, with brown being dominant and blue being recessive.
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.
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.
About 10,000 years ago, everyone in the world had brown eyes. Scientists believe that the first blue-eyed person had a genetic mutation that caused the body to produce less melanin.
Though common in some breeds of cats, dogs, cattle and horses due to inbreeding, heterochromia is uncommon in humans, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the United States, and is not associated with lack of genetic diversity.
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.
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.