How Rare Is Dirty Blonde Hair And Blue Eyes?

How Rare Is Dirty Blonde Hair And Blue Eyes
The Takeaway – Biology is a fascinating science but knowing the entirety of parents’ genes wouldn’t give a definite answer to what eye and hair color combination their baby will have. Sometimes luck plays the deciding role in this process. But even though every combo is unique because it carries traces of genetic history, some are rarer than others.

That doesn’t necessarily make them more mesmerizing, but it makes them more intriguing. However, rare hair-eye color combinations are more captivating when they turn an individual into an outlier. For instance, if a blonde child with blue eyes is born in a dark-haired family or a baby is born with brown eyes and black hair in a place where recessive genes are more common (e.g., Northern Europe), they will often stand out.

Ultimately, natural redheads with blue eyes are the rarest combination, regardless of the place of birth. Only one in 100 people have this fascinating combo. That means only 13 million persons out of the 7.6 billion on Earth have red hair and blue eyes.

Since this number is very low, some scientists fear this combination may go extinct. But what makes this mixture so rare biologically? – It is a result of two contrasting sets of DNA instructions. Hence, two different mutations must occur in a person simultaneously to have red hair and blue eyes. Although that is not so rare in Scotland and Ireland (up to 30 percent of people have this combination), that is still a tiny percent of the global population.

Nonetheless, the risk of disappearing red hair and blue eyes is insignificant, as many individuals carry this gene, even if it’s not visible in their appearance. Thus, red hair isn’t necessarily fierce red; it can also be auburn brown and strawberry blonde.

Is dirty blonde hair a rare color?

It is not rare at all. Dirty blonde hair and green eyes are more common than regular blonde hair and green eyes.

Is Dirty blonde just brown?

Is dirty brown hair brown or blonde? – Dirty blonde is unlike your typical squeaky clean blonde shades like platinum and champagne, The hue is a medium to dark blonde shade with wheaty, brown undertones (hence, the word dirt in the name). These hints of brunette make dirty blonde dimensional and low-maintenance—what more could you want?

What dirty blondes look like?

What Is The Dirty Blonde Hair Shade? –

Dirty blonde is a shade that is somewhere between dark blonde and very light brown. While it is naturally a cool tone, bright blonde hues (like gold) can be added to it to make it warm. You can also add an ashy hue to make it cooler.

It is also called ‘dishwater blonde’ as it resembles the color of water after dishes have been cleaned in it. Weird, I know!

It works best with light to medium complexions. Ashy or brownish dirty blonde hair looks the best on a cool skin tone, If you have blue or green eyes, these shades will make them pop. A dark dirty blonde shade will look good on warm skin tones.

Where is blonde hair blue eyes common?

Why almost people in Europe have blue eyes and blonde hair? Thanks. Question Date: 2007-09-05 Answer 1: This is a good example of the influence of the environment on natural selection. A trait that is better in one environment could be worse in another. An evolutionary anthropologist named Nina Jablonski helped solve this mystery in the 1990s. Human hair, eye, and skin color all come from a pigment called melanin. The more of this substance you have, the darker you can be. Some genes tell you to make more or less of it, other genes tell it where in your body to go. People who live in areas where there is a lot of sun are in greater danger of getting skin cancer and cataracts (a cloudiness in the eye). Also, too much sun causes people to use up their folic acid (a type of vitamin B). Folic acid is needed for an embryo’s nervous system to form correctly, so pregnant women who get too much sun are more likely to have babies with brains and spinal cords that are not formed correctly. So people with lighter skin and hair in sunny climates probably did not live as long as people with darker skin and hair, and left fewer children. People who live in areas where there is not a lot of sun have a different problem. People need sunlight in order for their cells to make vitamin D. People need vitamin D in order to absorb calcium. You probably know that we need calcium for our bones and teeth, but it is also vital for lots of other things, including making our muscles contract. So people with darker skin in northern climates (such as northern Europe) probably did not live as long as people with lighter skin and hair, and left fewer children. The eye color question may not be quite as clear. There may be advantages to having different eye colors in different climates, but it could also be that some of the same genes for having lighter or darker skin lead to lighter or darker eyes. How do you think global climate change, vitamin supplements, or movement of people influence what will happen with human skin and eye color in the future? Thanks for asking, Answer 2: The Scandinavian people from way up north, where there is not much sun have evolved to having light skin to let in what little sunlight there is. However, now so many people move around, so that in Europe there are not so many people with blond hair and blue eyes anymore! The Roman people settled in southern Europe thousands of years ago; now you have Middle Eastern people settling there to escape the horrible wars in their own countries. And Indian people settled in Europe, too. Answer 3: It has to do with pigments and sunlight, and accidents of genetics. In parts of the world that don’t get much sunshine, it is healthier to be able to absorb more sunshine through the skin, including ultraviolet light (UV). A small amount of UV can help our bodies generate Vitamin D, which is an important vitamin for our bones and immune systems. But UV also causes cancer. To reduce this, our skin also contains pigments, which absorb some of the UV (but don’t make Vitamin D). We all have some pigments, which make our skin brown, black, red, or pink. Northern Europeans have the least amount of pigments because they need the least protection from UV, and because they historically needed the most UV. The genes that produce pigments for skin are similar or close to the genes that produce pigments for hair or eyes. So if you have light skin, you’re more likely to have light eyes and light hair -and to get skin cancer. Answer 4: Good question, but it probably has to do with the amount of sunlight that Europeans are exposed to. This is true in northern Europe than in southern Europe, by the way. Blue eyes and blond hair allow more sunlight to come in than brown eyes or dark hair, which is a good thing if there isn’t much sun to begin with (Europe is pretty far north), and a bad thing if there is a lot of sun (like in the tropics). This is also why most Europeans have light-colored skin, and,by contrast, why most Africans ( Africa is tropical )have dark skin. Answer 5: One thing I do know is why some people have light colored skin and some have dark colored skin. As it happens the Sun produces large amounts of ultra-violet (UV) radiation. Too much of it and you get skin cancer, too little and you are unable to synthesize vitamin D, needed to prevent rickets (a softening of the bones in children potentially leading to fractures and deformity). In other words, you need the right amount of UV radiation. Melanin is a substance in your skin cells that has the capacity to absorb UV radiation. Melanin is what determines the color of your skin. Large amounts and your skin has a dark color, small amounts and your skin has a light color. If you live close to the equator you will receive a larger amount of UV radiation from the Sun than if you live far from the equator. This means that you need larger amounts of melanin if you live near the equator than if you live far from it in order to protect you from excessive UV radiation. People living near the equator and having great amounts of melanin have a greater chance of surviving than people with small amounts of melanin also living near the equator. On the other hand, people living far from the equator and having large amounts of melanin will not be able to absorb enough UV radiation to synthesize vitamin D, therefore at those latitudes people with small amounts of melanin have the better chance of survival. Thus through evolution, most people living close to the equator have dark colored skin and most people living far from the equator have light colored skin. At least that used to be the case several thousand years ago, when groups of migrating people would take literally thousands of years to move from one region of the earth to another. Recently, researchers in genetics have concluded that if an isolated group of people were to remain in only one region of the earth, after about 25000 years their descendants will acquire a skin coloring best suited for the latitude of that region. Answer 6: This is a good question and an active area of research for scientists studying human evolution. I should first point out that blonde hair and blue eyes are prevalent only in certain parts of Europe – northern France, northern Germany and Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc.), primarily. These are regions where “Nordic” peoples dominate, but in other regions of Europe like the Mediterranean and Balkan areas, darker hair, eyes, and complexions are more common. The best evidence we have suggests that these traits became common in Nordic populations during the last Ice Age because of “sexual selection.” Sexual selection is a type of evolution in which one sex has an arbitrary preference for a particular trait in the other sex. For example, there is a small fish in Trinidad called the swordtail. Male swordtails have one extra-long fin that doesn’t really do anything. But female swordtails prefer to mate with males with a long fin, for no apparent reason. If you trim a male’s fin, females refuse to mate with him, and if you artificially lengthen his fin, females go crazy for him. This is a trait that has evolved just because females have this unexplained preference for males with long fins. This is called sexual selection because one sex is driving the evolution of a trait in the other sex. It seems like the same thing might have happened in northern Europe in the Ice Age. Around this time, humans were hunter-gatherers, so most men were off hunting for (and being killed by) wooly mammoths and such. So many men died doing this that there were fewer men than women in the population, so men got to be pretty choosy about the women they would mate with. For whatever reason, men in these populations developed a preference for blonde hair and blue eyes. So the genes for blonde hair/blue eyes might have been rare in the population at first, but because women with those traits were found to be more attractive, they could find mates more easily and had more children. Pretty quickly (on an evolutionary timescale ) blonde hair and blue eyes became very common in those populations. People with blonde hair and blue eyes might have popped up every now and then in human populations outside of northern Europe, too, but because the ration of men/women was more even in those other populations, sexual selection was less intense, so those traits never became common. (Although a similar sort of thing seems to have happened with red hair and green eyes in ancient Irish populations). In your question you didn’t ask about skin color, but of course having fair skin also tends to go along with blonde hair and blue eyes. Unlike hair and eye color, it seems that light skin color may have had a real advantage for early northern Europeans. Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that humans can produce only by exposing their skin to UV radiation from the sun. If you live in a very sunny place this is no problem, but humans in very high latitudes (like northern Europe) see very little sunlight for most of the year. One way to avoid a vitamin D deficiency in that sort of environment is to have lighter skin, allowing more UV radiation to penetrate and create vitamin D. So anyway, there once was a real advantage to having lighter skin if you lived in northern Europe, and that’s why people from that region are so pale now. Of course today we can get plenty of vitamin D from dairy products that have been enriched with that vitamin, and having fair skin is actually a detriment if you live down in the tropics, because you’ll get sunburned all the time. Hope this answered your question. Answer 7: COMMENT FROM A SCIENTIST: This site claims that lighter eye, hair, and skin color evolved by natural selection, controlled by sun exposure in the area in which people lived. I don’t know when this answer was posted, but an alternative theory has been proposed based on sexual selection rather than natural selection. This USA Today article cites Jared Diamond: “dark peoples of equatorial West Africa and the New Guinea mountains get no more UV radiation than the light-skinned folk in Switzerland, if you take cloud cover into account.” The article also cites Charles Taylor of UCLA, who finds Diamond’s proposal logical, but only because he apparently accepts the argument that UV radiation isn’t the likely cause, and there doesn’t seem to be any other reasonable theory at this point. ( click here ) Peter Frost ( here ) argues for sexual selection as well, and plots variation in skin/hair/eye color against areas of the world where the environment caused an imbalance in the sexes-not enough men, or women, to go around. Any recessive trait that would make a potential mate stand out could give that mate a selection advantage, and allow him/her to pass on the recessive genes. He has maps to show the distribution. Light colors do appear randomly occasionally-apparently, blonde hair has shown up in some Australian Aborigines and in other unexpected places. I just thought you might want to bring your site up to date to let readers know there are competing theories, and the case is by no means settled yet. Thanks for providing this great service to the public! Click Here to return to the search form.

What is European hair color?

Advances in Anthropology Vol.4 No.2(2014), Article ID:46104,11 pages DOI:10.4236/aa.2014.42011 The Puzzle of European Hair, Eye, and Skin Color Peter Frost c/o Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, Anthropology Department, Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada Email: [email protected] Copyright © 2014 by author and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. Received 22 January 2014; revised 23 February 2014; accepted 15 March 2014 ABSTRACT Europeans, particularly northern and eastern Europeans, are unusually colored. Their hair can be not only black but also brown, flaxen, golden, or red, and their eyes not only brown but also blue, gray, hazel, or green.

Their skin is pale, almost like an albino’s.
This color scheme is more developed in women than in men and seems to have been selected for its visual properties, particularly brightness and novelty.
Sexual selection is a likely cause.
It favors eye-catching colors and, if strong enough, can produce a color polymorphism, i.e., whenever a visible feature becomes differently colored through mutation, the new color will spread through the population until it loses its novelty value and becomes as frequent as the original one.

Such selection is consistent with 1) the many alleles for European hair and eye color; 2) the high ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous variants; and 3) the relatively short time over which this color diversity developed. Sexual selection will target women if they outnumber men on the mate market.

Among early modern humans, such imbalances resulted from 1) a low polygyny rate (because few men could provide for a second wife and her children) and 2) a high risk of early male death (because long hunting distances increased exposure to environmental hazards).
Sexual selection of women was stronger at latitudes farther from the equator, where men were less polygynous and more at risk of death while hunting.

It was strongest on continental steppe-tundra, where men provided for almost all family food needs by pursuing herds of reindeer and other herbivores over long distances. Although this type of environment is now fragmentary, it covered until 10,000 years ago a much larger territory—the same area where, today, hair and eyes are diversely colored and skin almost milk white. 1. Introduction Most humans have black hair, brown eyes, and brown skin. Europeans have a different color scheme, their hair being also brown, flaxen, golden, or red, and their eyes also blue, gray, hazel, or green. Finally, their skin is pale, almost like an albino’s.

How did this unusual color scheme come about? Perhaps the genetic change that lightened the skin also affected the hair and the eyes. Yet the genes are different in each case. European skin lightened mainly through the appearance of new alleles at three genes: SLC45A2, SLC24A5, and TYRP1 (Beleza et al., 2013; Canfield et al., 2014; Soejima et al., 2005; Voight et al., 2006),

European hair color diversified through a proliferation of new alleles at MC1R (Box et al., 1997; Flanagan et al., 2000; Makova & Norton, 2005; Rana et al., 1999), European eye color diversified through a proliferation of new alleles in the HERC2-OCA2 region and elsewhere (Duffy et al., 2007; Eiberg et al., 2008; Kayser et al., 2008; Liu et al., 2010; Sturm & Frudakis, 2004; Sturm et al., 2008),

Light skin is associated with a few of the new hair and eye color alleles, particularly the ones for red hair or blue eyes. Conceivably, these alleles may be a side effect of selection for lighter skin (Duffy et al., 2004; Sturm & Frudakis, 2004), But why would such selection increase the total number of alleles for hair and eye color, especially when so many of them have little or no effect on skin color? And why have neither red hair nor blue eyes reached fixation in any human population, even those with milk-white complexions? The European color scheme has another puzzling aspect.

It seems to result from a selection pressure that acted primarily on women and only secondarily on men: – Hair color varies more in women than in men. Redheads are especially more frequent among women (Shekar et al., 2008), – Eye color varies more in women than in men when both copies of the so-called blue-eye allele are present, the result being a greater diversity of female eye colors wherever blue eyes are the single most common phenotype, i.e., in northern and eastern Europe (Martinez-Cadenas et al., 2013),

See also: Why Do Dogs Have Brown Eyes?

Blue eyes are associated in men with a more feminine face shape (Kleisner et al., 2010; Kleisner et al., 2013), – In all human populations, women are paler than men after puberty. This post-pubescent lightening is due to sexual maturation and not to differences in sun exposure (Edwards & Duntley, 1939; Edwards & Duntley, 1949; Edwards et al., 1941; van den Berghe & Frost, 1986),

In women, lightness of skin correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat and with 2nd to 4th digit ratio—a marker of prenatal estrogenization (Manning et al., 2004; Mazess, 1967), Admittedly, this sex difference is not greater in Europeans than in other populations, although it could not easily be otherwise, since Europeans are so close to the physiological limit of depigmentation.

While women are more diverse than men both in hair and eye color, this greater diversity came about differently in each case.
With hair color, women have more of the intermediate hues because the darkest hue (black) is less easily expressed (Shekar et al., 2008),
With eye color, women have more of the intermediate hues because the lightest hue (blue) is less easily expressed (Martinez-Cadenas et al., 2013),

In sum, European hair and eye color diversified through a selection pressure that acted on different genes via different pigmentary changes. The common denominator seems to be the creation of new visual stimuli on or near the face—the focus of visual attention.2.

Sexual Selection? What type of selection pressure would make a facial feature more colorful in one sex than in the other? The likeliest type is sexual selection, which occurs when the mate market has too many of one sex and too few of the other.
The more one must compete for a mate, the more one must vie for attention, and the more success requires eye-catching qualities (Darwin, 1936: pp.567-924; Emlen & Oring, 1977),

This is the logic of advertising. “Visual merchandising” matters most in saturated markets that offer too many interesting choices among products of equal quality (Lea-Greenwood, 1998; Oakley, 1990), One way to catch the eye is through bright or novel colors.

Brightness keeps a color in memory longer, and novelty focuses attention on a color longer (Brockmole & Boot, 2009; Maan & Cummings, 2009),
Significantly, perhaps, hair and eye colors are not only more diverse in Europe but also brighter.
Hair is carrot red but not beet red.
Eyes are sky blue but not navy blue.

Other ways to catch the eye include enlargement of secondary sexual characteristics and enhancement of facial features. The effect is to “boost the signal” from visual features that are used either for sex identification or for communication and personal identification (Manning, 1972: pp.47-49),3.

Frequency-Dependent Sexual Selection and Color Polymorphism If strong enough, sexual selection may create a color polymorphism.
Whenever a visible feature becomes differently colored through mutation, the new color will spread through the population until it loses its novelty value and becomes as frequent as the original one.

The resulting equilibrium will last until another color variant appears, and the total number of colors will thus grow over time. Such polymorphisms are known in a number of animal species, notably guppies, lizards, and various insects (Anderson, 1969; Brooks, 2002; Eakley & Houde, 2004; Endler, 1980; Farr, 1980; Grant et al., 1974; Hampton et al., 2009; Healey et al., 2008; Hughes et al., 1999; Hughes et al., 2005; Kokko et al., 2007; Muggleton, 1979; Olendorf et al., 2006; Simchuk, 2001; Sinnock, 1970),

Humans, too, tend to prefer novel colors when choosing mates.
In one study, men were shown pictures of attractive women and asked to choose the one they most wanted to marry.
One series had equal numbers of brunettes and blondes, a second series 1 brunette for every 5 blondes, and a third 1 brunette for every 11 blondes.

It turned out that the scarcer the brunettes were in a series, the likelier any one brunette would be chosen (Thelen, 1983), Another study likewise found that Maxim cover girls were much more often light blonde or dark brown than the usual dark blonde or light brown of real life (Anon, 2008),

This novelty effect may be seen in sales of home interior colors over the past half-century: preference for one paint color rises until satiated, then falls and yields to preference for another (Stansfield & Whitfield, 2005),
Preference for novel colors, together with sufficiently strong sexual selection, may have caused European hair and eye color to diversify.

At the main hair-color gene, MC1R, Europeans have 11 nonsynonymous alleles versus 5 for Asians and 1 for Africans (Harding et al., 2000), The actual disparity is even greater because the Asian alleles produce similar phenotypes. Europeans likewise have many alleles for eye color within the HERC2- OCA2 region (Liu et al., 2010),

Contrary to widespread belief, brown eyes are not truly dominant and blue eyes are not truly recessive. A single copy of the blue-eye allele usually produces an intermediate hue, like green or hazel, and even two copies will not always produce blue eyes (Branicki et al., 2009; Eiberg et al., 2008; Martinez-Cadenas et al., 2013),

These new hair and eye colors cannot be older than the arrival of modern humans in Europe around 40,000 years ago. Such a narrow timeframe argues for some kind of selection, rather than relaxation of selection and accumulation of non-adaptive mutations.

The second scenario requires close to a million years to produce the current variability of hair and eye color, including approximately 80,000 years for today’s prevalence of red hair alone (Harding et al., 2000; Templeton, 2002),4. Latitudinal Variation in the Intensity of Sexual Selection If ancestral Europeans gained new hair and eye colors through sexual selection, something must have skewed the ratio of men to women on the mate market.

Such an imbalance can arise if the risk of early death differs by sex or if one sex tends to mate more often than the other one (Darwin, 1936: pp.573-578; Emlen & Oring, 1977), In most mammalian species, the males are the ones with more mates because they can return to the mate market sooner after impregnation.

In contrast, the females are unavailable during pregnancy, lactation, and infant care.
This pattern applies less to our species.
Because humans have a longer infancy, the male is better able to increase his reproductive fitness by providing for his mate and her offspring.
The more he becomes a provider, the more each act of mating will end up costing him and the longer he will stay off the mate market.

In early human societies, i.e., hunter-gatherers and simple farming peoples, male provisioning varied with latitude. It was minimal in the tropics because women could gather or grow food year-round on their own. Polygyny was thus common, being limited not so much by a man’s capacity to be a provider as by his ability to compete against rival males (van den Berghe, 1979: pp.65-67),

Women were less self-reliant beyond the tropics. During winter, they could no longer gather or grow food and depended on meat from their hunting spouses. This dependence increased with longer winters at higher latitudes (Hoffecker, 2002: p.8; Kelly, 1995: pp.262-270), Whereas women supplied 40% – 55% of all food consumed by hunter-gatherers below 40˚N, the proportion fell to less than 10% above 60˚N (Martin, 1974: pp.16-18),

At those latitudes, only a very able hunter could take a second wife (Kjellström, 1973: p.118), Higher latitudes meant not just fewer men on the mate market but also fewer men altogether. Because women could not supply as much food and because the land supported a lower density of wildlife, men had to hunt for longer periods and over longer distances, with the result that more of them died from falls, drowning, starvation, and cold exposure (Burch Jr., 1972: pp.339-368, 347, 349-350; Hoffecker, 2002: pp.8-9; Kelly, 1995: pp.128-132; Krupnik, 1985),

Women thus faced a more competitive mate market and stronger pressures of sexual selection. This was especially so on the continental steppe-tundra of the sub-Arctic, where almost all food came from hunting of reindeer and other migratory game (Hoffecker, 2002: pp.7-12; Schild, 1976), Although continental steppe-tundra is now confined to parts of northeastern Siberia, Alaska, and the Canadian Arctic, it was much more extensive during the last ice age 25,000 to 10,000 years ago, when it formed a broad Eurasian zone that stretched across the plains of northern and eastern Europe and into northern Asia (see Figure 1 ).

This zone was continuously inhabited only at its western end. The climate was milder there because the Scandinavian icecap had pushed the steppe-tundra south of the 50˚N parallel and because the nearby Atlantic Ocean provided warmth and moisture (Butzer, 1971: pp.144, 463; Hoffecker, 2002: pp.3, 17),

These conditions favored a lush growth of grasses, mosses, lichens, and low shrubs, which supported large herds of herbivores and, in turn, a large human population.
East of the Urals, this zone swung north into colder, drier territory.
The Asian steppe-tundra was not only farther north but also farther from the Atlantic’s moderating influence.

Its human population was thus smaller and prone to extinction over large areas, particularly during the glacial maximum (Goebel, 1999; Graf, 2009a; Graf, 2009b), This view is supported by analysis of DNA retrieved from human remains dated to 24,000 BP and 17,000 BP in south-central Siberia.

Although the DNA shows strong affinities with present-day Europeans and Amerindians, the affinity is more distant with present-day Siberians, who seem to be largely the product of repeopling from the south near the end of the last ice age (Maanasa et al., 2013), The European steppe-tundra was thus a singularity among the many environments that modern humans entered while spreading out from Africa during the Paleolithic.

Food was abundant but accessible only to males of hunting age, whose ranks were continually thinned by hunting-related mortality. The resulting surplus of mateable females, combined with the high cost of polygyny, would have greatly intensified sexual selection of women.

This region, essentially the plains of northern and eastern Europe, is today a singularity on the world map of human physical variation.
If we add Scandinavia, which was repeopled from these plains after the last ice age, we have the same region where the skin is whitest and the hair and eyes most diversely colored (Frost, 2006; Frost, 2008),

This geographic singularity stands out even more further back in time. Ancient DNA from two Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, one from Luxembourg (8000 BP) and the other from Spain (7000 BP), reveals that both had brown skin even though they postdate the timeframe when European skin became white ( Beleza et al., 2013; Canfield et al., 2014; Lazaridis et al., 2013; Olalde et al., 2014; see Table 1 ).

On the other hand, both had non-brown eyes (Lazaridis et al., 2013; Olalde et al., 2014),
It seems that these European color traits evolved initially within part of Europe—the plains of the north and east—and only later spread outward to the rest of the continent and elsewhere, perhaps through a succession of demographic expansions.

It also seems that the changes to hair, eye, and skin color were not simultaneous. Diversification of eye color preceded diversification of hair color and whitening of the skin. Table 1, Evolution of European color traits.5. Sex Linkage? If hairand eye-color diversity is due to sexual selection of women, it should be expressed more in women than in men. There should be sex linkage. Initially, such selection would have acted on whatever alleles were available, these being for the most part not sex-linked.

Over time, there would have arisen new alleles that produce non-black hair and non-brown eyes to a greater degree in women, and these alleles would have gradually replaced the older ones.
This process would have admittedly been limited by the narrow timeframe of intense sexual selection, i.e., the last ice age.

The new alleles show some sex linkage. Girls are lighter-haired than boys after puberty (Steggerda, 1941), During adulthood, blond hair darkens with age more slowly in women than in men (Olivier, 1960: p.74), A twin study has confirmed that hair is lighter in women than in men and that women show greater variation in hair color (Shekar et al., 2008),

Finally, an unpublished digit ratio study indicates that prenatal exposure to estrogen is higher in individuals with non-black hair or non-brown eyes (Mather et al., unpublished), If prenatal estrogen mediates this sex linkage, one result may be a more feminine face shape if eyes are not brown. This was the unintended finding of two Czech studies where the participants were asked to rate male and female facial photos (Kleisner et al., 2010; Kleisner et al., 2013),

The initial finding was that brown-eyed men were perceived as more dominant than blue-eyed men. When, as a control, the brown-eyed men were photoshopped to look blue-eyed, they were still rated as more dominant. Careful examination revealed that they had more masculine faces with broader and more massive chins, broader mouths, larger noses, larger eyebrows, and closer-set eyes.

The blue-eyed men had smaller and sharper chins, narrower mouths, smaller noses, and a greater distance between the eyes. Only the male faces showed this relationship between eye color and face shape, perhaps because female face shape is hormonally overdetermined, i.e., all girls are exposed to enough estrogen in the womb to feminize their faces, but only blue-eyed boys reach this level of exposure.

Could it be that eye color correlated with face shape because some of the photos showed partly Jewish or Roma men with darker eyes and a different face shape? If so, the brown-eyed men should have been more variable in face shape, yet they were not. This explanation also fails to explain why blue eyes correlated with facial feminization in men but not in women.

We see a similar pattern with eye color and shyness. In preschool boys, shyness is more strongly associated with blue eyes than with brown eyes. This association is absent in preschool girls (Coplan et al., 1998),6. Other Physical Legacies of Strong Sexual Selection If intense sexual selection of women had created the palette of European hair and eye colors, it could have caused other physical characteristics to assume a specific color or form.

There may thus be other legacies of this episode of human evolution.6.1. Whitening of the Skin One legacy may be the extreme loss of skin pigment we see in northern and eastern Europe—the same region where hair and eye color have diversified. This whitening is often said to be an adaptation to lower levels of solar UV at higher latitudes and under cloudier skies.

With less need for UV protection, the skin no longer had to be so dark. Alternatively, the skin lightened so that more UV could pass through it for vitamin-D synthesis (Robins, 1991: pp.187-212), This kind of explanation fails for two reasons. First, ground-level solar UV is equally low across Europe, northern Asia, and North America at latitudes above 47˚N (Jablonski & Chaplin, 2000: pp.71, 76),

Yet it is only in Europe that we see extreme whitening of the skin. Second, according to a study of the genes responsible, Europeans became white-skinned during the last ice age and long after their ancestors had entered Europe some 40,000 years ago ( Beleza et al., 2013; Canfield et al., 2014; Norton & Hammer, 2007 ; see Table 1 ).

The implication is that our European ancestors were brown-skinned for tens of thousands of years” (Gibbons, 2007),
If white skin is an adaptation to lower levels of solar UV, ancestral Europeans should have begun to whiten once they had reached the more northerly and cloudier environments of Europe.

But if the cause had been sexual selection, why did the skin become white instead of more diversely colored, like the hair and the eyes? It may be that men tended to choose lighter-skinned women from the outset because paleness is widely viewed as a female norm.

In all human populations, women are the “fair sex”, their skin having less melanin and less peripheral blood flow.
Male skin is brown and ruddy by comparison (Edwards & Duntley, 1939; Edwards & Duntley, 1949; Edwards et al., 1941; Frost, 1988; Frost, 2010; Manning et al., 2004; Mazess, 1967; van den Berghe & Frost, 1986),

The human mind thus seems predisposed to distinguish men from women by their skin coloring, even more so than by their face shape, as shown by the ability of subjects to tell whether a face is male or female even if the image is blurred and differs only in color (Tarr et al., 2001),

The gender cues are hue and luminosity. Besides having a less brown and less ruddy complexion, women also display higher luminous contrast between their facial skin and their lips and eyes (Dupuis-Roy et al., 2009), This may be why so many cultures have independently developed cosmetics to lighten facial skin while darkening the lips and the eye area (Russell, 2009; Russell, 2010),

There is likewise a cross-cultural tendency to see fairerskinned women as more feminine and to prefer them as mates, at least in traditional cultures (van den Berghe & Frost, 1986), Thus, among ancestral Europeans, and under conditions of intense sexual selection, darker women would have been disadvantaged on the mate market except when scarce enough to benefit from the novelty effect.

Over time, mean skin color would have steadily lightened until sexual selection for lighter female skin had encountered equally strong natural selection for darker skin (to protect against solar UV) or a physiological limit to further loss of pigmentation.
If Europeans became white because of stronger sexual selection for lightness of female skin, one might expect them to show a larger sex difference in skin color.

Actually, this sex difference is largest in people with medium-colored skin (Frost, 2007; Madrigal & Kelly, 2006), There may be a ceiling effect in very light-skinned people, i.e., female skin color cannot diverge as much from male skin color because both are already close to the physiological limit of depigmentation.6.2.

Face and Body Morphology Another legacy may be face shape. In Europeans, the face seems to have assumed its present form through a selection pressure that acted primarily on women (Liberton et al., 2009), As with skin color, selection for more feminine-looking women would have spilled over on to men as well, causing the population as a whole to have more feminine faces.

Finally, this intensification of sexual selection may have affected secondary sexual characteristics that have long assumed different forms in men and women. In such cases, the existing sexual dimorphism should be enhanced. This may be why women of European descent have wider hips, narrower waists, and thicker subcutaneous fat than do women of other origins (Choi & Trotter, 1970; Gasperino, 1996; Hrdlicka, 1898; Meredith & Spurgeon, 1980; Nelson & Nelson, 1986),7.

Conclusion Sexual selection best explains the puzzle of European hair, eye, and skin color. Within the same geographic range, and long after modern humans had arrived in Europe, all three color traits changed greatly at an apparently fast rate. Although hair color and eye color both underwent a similar diversification that produced similarly conspicuous hues, this process occurred at separate genes and in different ways.

The new hues were also on or near the face, which is the focus of visual attention. Finally, this evolutionary change went farther in women than in men. It seems, then, that the European color scheme was selected for its visual qualities in a context where women were the observed and men the observers.

Such a context is consistent with the European steppe-tundra of the last ice age, where men were scarce on the mate market because of the high cost of polygyny and the high mortality due to long hunting distances.
There was thus selection for visible female features that catch male attention, either through display of bright or novel colors or through enhancement of existing sexual dimorphisms.

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What race had the first blue eyes?

Okay, let me preview this article: I posted this scientific finding about the MUTATION of Brown eyes to being Blue due to a recent post on the subjects in a couple of threads. My parents tell me, out of my siblings that I was born with blue eyes and red hair and red skin.

By the time of my 4th month baby picture, I can see that my eyes were light brown, and my hair and skin was very red. Not anymore. My siblings came out brown. One of my younger siblings was born very chocolate and she was clean bald but later, she grew beautiful and very black hair that does not ‘fro’, but it has a combination texture.

A couple of years ago, scientist determined that BLUE EYES was a MUTATION that occurred around 6,000 years ago and it stems from A BLACK MALE AFRICAN ORIGIN. They report several archeological proofs puts this event around the BLACK SEA AREA. Based on my research, I absolutely agree.

Blonde hair and Blue eyes is NOT a White European trait in origin for significant reasons and although the scholars today give partial break down on this subject, it still is scientifically based.
Blue eyes stem from ‘PIGMENTATION’ and without this, eyes will not have any coloring such as in a pure ALBINO.

So this has been obvious to the scientific community for a long time, but for some reason they just are reporting this now. Like Blue eyes, ‘Blonde hair’ also has pigmentation! –But not, White hair. There is a difference between Blonde hair, White hair and Graying hair.

BTW—This would be the same account given in my reference source, scientific reference source, about the Biblical Cain.
His descendants migrated NODEAST and that would have been, Northeast of ‘Eden’ where the four rivers began, and thus, around the Black Sea Area were the first ancient city-civilization set up in CATAL HUYUK.

======================================================= How one ancestor helped turn our brown eyes blue Thursday 31 January 2008 01:00 Steve Connor “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.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-one-ancestor-helped-turn-our-brown-eyes-blue-776170.html 84,112 views Jan 27, 2014, 12:23 pm Blue-Eyed African Caveman Found In Europe Paul Rogers, Contributor A stone-age hunter’s wisdom tooth has revealed that he had an unusual mix of racial traits – dark, African skin, curly brown hair and blue eyes,

Preliminary DNA analysis of the exceedingly well-preserved 7,000-year-old skeleton, dubbed Brana-1, has overturned ideas about the descent of modern Europeans. Although the hunter’s closest modern-day relatives live in Sweden and Finland, the genes for his skin colour are African.

Https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrodgers/2014/01/27/stone-age-hunter-had-blue-eyes-and-dark-african-skin/ JOHN BRYSON/SYGMA/CORBIS Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue? Feb.1, 2008, 12:00 AM Blue-eyed? Thank a genetic switch that turns off your body’s ability to make brown pigment in your peepers.
Researchers have finally located the mutation that causes blue eyes, and the findings suggest that all blue-eyed humans share a single common ancestor born 6000 to 10,000 years ago.

Researchers have implicated the OCA2 gene in several eye colors. The gene is involved in the production of melanin, a pigment that gives hair and skin their hues http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2008/02/dont-it-make-your-brown-eyes-blue How Rare Is Dirty Blonde Hair And Blue Eyes The skeleton of La Braña 1, as it was discovered in 2006. Credit: J.M. Vidal Encina Ethiopian boy has a form of albinism that only affects his eyes, turning them bright blue. April 29, 2016 admin Human Ethiopian boy with Ble eyes Babies with both Blonde Hair & Blue Eyes

What is the rarest skin hair and eye combination?

The rarest hair and eye color combination – What are the rarest hair and eye color combinations? That’d be red hair with blue eyes. 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.

That makes the blue eye and red hair combination even more unlikely to happen. In addition, with both red hair and blue eyes being something akin to recessive traits, having parents that are able to pass on two sets of recessive genes is very unlikely. In most cases, you’d have blue eyes and hair somewhere on the spectrum of blond to brown, or red hair with brown, hazel or green eyes.

According to an article by evolutionary biology professor Mark Elgar, PhD, of the University of Melbourne, blue-eyed redheads are the absolute rarest, with 0.17% of the population having that combination of hair and eye color. So if that describes you, you’re most likely one in a million (or more!).

Julie Kaplan, MD, physician at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare World Atlas : “The World’s Population by Eye Color” World Atlas : “What Percentage of the World’s Population Has Brown Hair?” Nature : “Genome-wide study of hair colour in UK Biobank explains most of the SNP heritability” American Academy of Ophthalmology : “Your Blue Eyes Aren’t Really Blue” University of Melbourne : “Are Redheads with Blue Eyes Really Going Extinct?”

Can 2 blue eyes make a brown?

Can two parents with blue eyes have a child with brown eyes? Yes, blue-eyed parents can definitely have a child with brown eyes. Or green or hazel eyes for that matter. If you stayed awake during high school biology, you might find this answer surprising.

We were all taught that parents with blue eyes have kids with blue eyes.
Every time.
This has to do with the fact that blue eyes are supposed to be recessive to brown eyes.
This means that if a parent has a brown eye gene, then that parent will have brown eyes.
Which makes it impossible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child – they don’t have a brown eye gene to pass on! In fact, this is the model we used for our eye color calculator.* And that we talk about extensively here at Ask a Geneticist.

Blue-eyed parents can have kids with brown eyes. (Image via Shutterstock) Now we aren’t being dishonest or trying to hide anything by presenting this model. It works great most of the time. But as with anything genetic, there are always exceptions. For example, DNA can and does change between generations.

So if a change happened that turned a blue eye color gene into a brown one, then blue-eyed parents could have a brown-eyed child. As you might guess, this sort of thing is pretty rare. Too rare to explain all the exceptions we see with eye color. So something else must be going on. That something is most likely other genes involved in eye color that we don’t know about.

Eye color used to be presented as a fairly simple trait. A big part of the model was the idea that we had an eye color gene that came in two varieties – brown and blue. Geneticists represented the brown version as “B” and the blue version as “b”. The model also said that blue (b) was recessive to brown (B).

This matters because it is an explanation for how brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child.
See, we have two copies of each of our genes – one from each biological parent.
This means there are three possible combinations for this eye color gene: BB, Bb, and bb.
BB is of course brown and in this model, bb would be blue.

Since blue is recessive to brown, Bb people have brown eyes. But they can pass a “b” down to their kids, who might end up with blue eyes. Now eye color is obviously more complicated than this. This model doesn’t explain green eyes for example. Scientists added a second gene to try to explain green eyes but we don’t need to go into that here ( to learn more about the two-gene model).

Genes	What it Means
BB	Brown eyes
B b	Brown eyes
bb	Not brown eyes

Again, bb people should not be able to pass on brown eyes to their kids. But we know they can. Which means that this model is incomplete (or wrong). The results I just put into the previous table are theoretical and based on the model I talked about. Here are some actual results I adapted from ‘s website:

Genes	What it Means in Europeans
BB	85% chance of brown eyes14% chance of green eyes 1% chance of blue eyes
B b	56% chance of brown eyes37% chance of green eyes 7% chance of blue eyes
bb	1% chance of brown eyes27% chance of green eyes 72% chance of blue eyes

As you can see, the original model holds up pretty well for BB and bb people. Most BB people have brown eyes and most bb people don’t. But the model clearly doesn’t explain the following:

1% of bb people have brown eyes
1% of BB people have blue eyes (and 14% have green)
44% of Bb people do not have brown eyes

The biggest disconnect is with Bb people. Only 56% have brown eyes. If this holds up, I am not sure we can even call blue and green recessive to brown. Whatever the reason, these data give some clues about how two blue-eyed parents might have a brown-eyed child.

For example, imagine two parents are Bb and have blue eyes.
They each pass a B down to one of their children.
That child will be BB and most likely have brown eyes.
This example uses known data to show how blue-eyed parents might have a child with brown eyes.
But it doesn’t explain why a Bb person has blue eyes in the first place.

To do this, we need to guess what other genes may be doing. And how they might be affecting the original eye color gene. Going into detail about these possibilities would need more space than I have here! And in the end, the truth is that eye color is a complex trait that we don’t fully understand yet.