People With Green Eyes: 6 Surprising Facts About Them

A person's gaze is the first thing we pay attention to when we interact with them for the first time. It is something instinctive: our eyes are going to meet each other's to, from that visual point of reference, connect with the emotions and feelings that the other ex.

Taking that into account, It is normal for people with green eyes to attract our attention.. Such a small part of the face is capable of attracting so much attention that it is common to see fathers and mothers calculate the chances of having offspring with this feature.

But green eyes are not only pure aesthetics, because they are also fascinating in other ways.

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Fun facts about people with green eyes

Below you can find what are the characteristics of people with green eyes that make this feature so mysterious and fascinating.

1. The hue of the iris is one of the rarest

It is estimated that only 2% of the world population has green eyes

, which means that only those with scarlet, black or red eyes are less numerous. This can be due to several reasons.

On the one hand, it is quite possible that a sufficient number of people with green eyes only appeared in relatively recent times. recent, a few thousand years ago, which means that they have not had time to mix much with DNA chains of all beings humans. It is estimated that the mutation that produced this characteristic appeared in tribes in central or northern Europe sometime in the Bronze Age.

On the other hand, the chances of having a boy or girl with green eyes only exceed 50% if both parents also have that trait. If only one of them has it, these drop below 40%.

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2. This trait first appeared in Europe

In addition to the rarity of this trait, it is estimated that more than half of people with green eyes live in Europe. Hungary and especially Iceland are the places where this physical trait is most abundant. Outside this continent, some ethnic groups belonging to the Indo-Iranian area also have high concentrations of people with the green eyes, although it is not very well known if they have a common ancestor or the gene responsible for that hue appeared in isolation in Asia.

Even rarer cases with green-eyed families are found in some areas of North Africa traditionally occupied by the Berber ethnic group, such as the Rif region in Morocco, Kabylia in Algeria, or They liquidate in China.

3. Green irises take months to appear

Interestingly, it is extremely rare for newborn babies to already have green eyes. Usually, those who get to have them of that color do so after completing their first year of life, and on the day of delivery they are blue or greyish. It is believed that this is due to a certain genetic propensity for the melanin in the eyes to be distributed following specific developmental rhythms.

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4. They have the most attractive eye color

Most questionnaire-based studies show that, at least for Western society, green eyes are the most aesthetic and attractive being those of blue tonality in second place. Perhaps the fact that they are rare can influence this, since the law of scarcity tells us that we tend to value more what is difficult to find.

5. Its coloration is not due to iris pigments

Although it may seem strange, people with green eyes do not have them that color because they have pigments of those shades located in those membranes. In fact, the amount of melanin, the substance that gives color to parts of the body, is relatively low compared to those with dark irises. If we were to attribute a color to the iris, it would be more similar to yellow.

What happens is that the shape of the eye and the lens effect it produces cause certain wavelengths of light to filter through this organ. It is something similar to what happens when sunlight enters the atmosphere, making the sky appear blue or pink depending on how far away the sun is at each moment of the day.

6. In the past they were discriminated

Although today it is considered an attractive feature, there were moments in history when the rare and mysterious nature of this hue was what attracted the most attention. Due, many women were suspected of being witches if they had green eyes Add to this the presence of red hair, and the combination could easily lead to execution.

Bibliographic references:

• Frost, P. (2011). "Why do Europeans have so many colors of hair and eyes?" (cogweb.ucla.edu). Communication Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.
• White, D., Rabago-Smith, M. (2011). Genotype–phenotype associations and human eye color. Journal of Human Genetics.