Eye Color
Pick your eye color and see how many people share it. Brown covers about 79% of the world, blue 8%, hazel 5%, green 2%.
The most common eye color globally, dominant in Africa, Asia, South America, and Southern Europe.
Shared with about
79%
of people worldwide have brown eyes
About 8 in 10 people share your eye colour, roughly 6.4 billion of the 8.1 billion alive today. The shares are estimates; nobody has counted.
Eye colour worldwide, estimated
Where it's most common
Dominant everywhere, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and South Asia
Famous people with brown eyes
In context
Blue eyes trace back to a change near the OCA2 gene that Eiberg et al. (2008) dated to roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, probably around the Black Sea. Everyone with blue eyes carries that same variant, which is as close as genetics gets to a shared ancestor. Brown is the original setting. Green and grey are later tweaks to how much melanin the iris makes and how the light scatters in it.
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About this test
Pick your eye colour. The module reports how common it is worldwide and gives a rarity percentile: the share of people who do not share it. Brown is about 79% of people, blue 8%, hazel 5%, gray 3%, green 2%, amber 2%, heterochromia 1%. Source: Sturm and Larsson (2009) plus population surveys.
Rarity depends on where you look. Blue eyes are rare globally but reach 80% in some Nordic regions. Green is the rarest of the common colours everywhere, with its highest shares in Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia.
What is the rarest eye colour?
Green and amber, at roughly 2% of people each worldwide, with gray at about 3%. Heterochromia (two different colours) is about 1% and is a condition rather than a colour. Brown, at 79%, is the common case.
What percentage of people have blue eyes?
About 8% worldwide. The share varies enormously: under 1% in most of Asia and Africa, up to 80% in some Nordic regions. The variant behind blue eyes traces to a single mutation near the Black Sea roughly 10,000 years ago.
Are brown eyes dominant?
They are the most common, at about 79%, and brown tends to win in the simple two-allele model taught in school. Real inheritance involves several genes (OCA2 and HERC2 do most of the work), so two brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child.
Percentiles above come from the same parameters the Eye Color module uses. See the methodology for how they are calculated.