Analyzing my abnormal rare eyes through genetics.

How my eyes normally look to people

For almost all my life I thought my eyes were green. It wasn’t until I accidentally came across an article that showed examples of different eye colors that I realized my eyes were definitely not green. Upon looking at different eye colors I found that I actually have grey eyes. This was a really surprise to me because I didn’t even know a person could have grey eyes. I never met anyone with grey eyes that I noticed before.

I’ve been complimented on my eyes a lot, but they have only been called blue, green, and hazel before by other people. This is probably since grey eyes aren’t really a thing people consider. Also my eyes can appear to be lighter or darker very easy since the pigment is kind of right in the middle between blue and green. So depending on the light and what I’m wearing they often switch between looking green or blue, even dark grey in low lighting which most people see as brown or black.

One thing I’ve heard about my eyes from a few other people is that they thought my eyes were hazel. I think this is because of the misconception between hazel eyes and central heterochromia. My eyes are actually really far from hazel under close examination. In hazel eyes the entire iris will border between green, gold, and brown. My eyes definitely don’t border on brown, gold, or green (if anything they border on green and blue). They have always had a distinct grey outer ring and have a brown almost red tone in the inner ring. When looking at eyes, if the inner ring of the iris is a distinct different color than the outer ring of the iris this is called central heterochromia. Central heterochromia its self is pretty rare, but not greatly. About 1/167 people have it.

How my eyes look under flash

Researching about eye colors I stumbled upon another rare variety of eye color which is a mixture of green and blue. This happens when the outer color of the iris is blue and the middle/inner(if you don’t have central heterochromia) color of the eye is green. This caught my interest since this eye color seems to be the closest multi color to my eyes, but there are still some noticeable differences when looking at all these eyes compared to mine. I decided to take a closer look at my eye to understand if I have green blue eyes.

One thing you’ll note quickly is that I do definitely have a lighter color in the center portion of my eye and darker color on the outer portion. In that regard they are quite similar to green blue eyes, but something about the color is just off.

It seems as though I have 3 different colors in my eyes, the inter ring that’s brown red caused by central heterochromia, the middle portion of the iris that appears to be light green and the outer portion of the iris that appears to be grey rather than blue. Combined together my eyes are a shade darker than almost all pictures I’ve seen of green blue eyes. Which leads me to believe my eyes are some type of extremely rare grey and green mixed variety where the outer portion of the iris is grey and the middle portion is green.

There is a possibility I have green blue eyes. I think I will continue to call my eyes grey. The main reason being is I have never seen any photo of green blue eyes examples close enough to mine. Almost all photos of people who have green blue eyes are all very light colored.

Going by WorldAtlas statistics it is estimated that 2% of the population has green eyes and less than 1% of the population has grey eyes. So I imagine having grey and green eyes with central heterochromia must be incalculably rare.

After researching I found that my eye color genotype rs12913832(G;G) is most common in Danish people. I’ve done a lot of genetic research recently from various services after I got my genome profile from my 23andme tests and this matches up with those results. Most of my DNA points to North Germanic descent and a collaboration of places in the European Atlantic. Although genotype traits are calculated by statistics and are not a 100% indication of traits someone might have they’re interesting none the less and are correct most of the time.

After learning that my genotype eye color was most common in Danish people, I decided to look up Danish eyes. To my surprise within the first images shown I found a girl that had remarkable eye color to my own (with mine being only slightly greener). They list this picture as “blonde hair blue eyes” because of the stereotype; however, her eyes are most certainly more grey than blue. I thought this was incredibly interesting. After looking through dozens of eyes I couldn’t find any similar to mine until I actually found out my genotype then traced it back to its origins. I guess it tells us how much we can learn about ourselves just from our DNA.