WE HAVE BEEN SHOCKED and appalled by the murder of George Floyd in the US, and heartened by the resistance of the Black Lives Matter movement.
But many confused people around the world, unaware of the genetic facts, still presume that they are wearing coloured contact lenses to hide their natural eye colour.īen Arogundade’s new book about online dating is out now. Williams’s are blue, while the others are green. For example, a black couple with brown eyes could conceive a child with naturally blue or green coloured eyes, so long as the gene for this eye colour exists somewhere within the ancestral line of both parents.īLUE AND GREEN IN BLACK Well-known stars of stage and screen such as Vanessa Williams, Rihanna, Tyra Banks and Terrence Howard, as well as Indian Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai, are well-known examples of celebrities of colour who do not have stereotypically brown eyes.
As mentioned, gene mutation is one cause the other occurs when a person of African heritage possesses Caucasian relatives on both sides of their family who are carriers of the gene for that particular eye colour. Bristow eventually had to make a statement refuting these claims about the child's eye colour, and maintaining that the image depicts the boy's natural eye colour.īLUE OR GREEN EYES IN BLACK: HOW DOES IT HAPPEN? Contrary to what many believe, blue and green eye colours do occur naturally in people of both black African and Asian ancestry. Notably, Google records more monthly queries about black people with natural blue eyes than it does about blacks with green eyes.īLACK PEOPLE BLUE EYES FAKE? When the photograph featured above (centre), called “The Boy with the Sapphire Eyes”, was first posted online, there were many comments claiming that the child's blue eyes had been photoshopped, or were altered using colour contact lenses, and that the image - taken by Vanessa Bristow - was a fake. Another 3,500 Google the term, “Black girls and women with green or blue eyes”, while 2,500 ask about a “black baby with blue eyes”. Indeed, according to Google’s global search statistics, 2,000 people type the question, “Can black people have blue eyes?” into their browsers each month, in search of clarification. “Originally, we all had brown eyes,” says Eiberg.ĬAN BLACK & AFRICAN PEOPLE HAVE BLUE OR GREEN EYES? Many believe that the blue-eyed gene, or indeed those for green or hazel eyes, only occurs naturally in Europeans, and that people of African heritage with these eye colours are wearing coloured contact lenses. The gene does not create a blue iris, but rather, it turns off the mechanism that produces brown melanin pigment. Their report, published in the journal, ‘Human Genetics’, identified a single mutation in a gene called OCA2, which arose by chance. “It could be the northern part of Afghanistan,” said Professor Hans Eiberg, who led the team. But in 2008 a report by a team of researchers from Copenhagen University traced all blue-eyed people back to one ancestor who lived approximately 8,000 years ago near the northwest coastal regions of the Black Sea. FOR MANY YEARS, the reasons why blue eyes exist in humans has eluded geneticists.
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