My partner and i have a 9mo, so i know his eye colour could still change. him and i have hazel, our son had blue, and only one grandparent has blue eyes. what’s the likelihood of different eye colours for him?
thank you!
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The gene that gives the iris the colour brown is a dominant gene. blue is recessive gene. This means the likelihood of your son to have blue eyes are pretty low. But it is not impossible. With the your information about your grandparent, it is likely a 85% chance for being brown.
The iris can also become Green. I would say there is equally big chance the eyes become green as the chance of them becomming blue.
Lots of babies have blue eyes, just like they have blonde hair. Not all. But common.
My eyes were light blue until I was about 16, which is rather late, then they went hazel.
At this point the child could grow into just about any color.
Like hair, I was strawberry blonde (blonde with red highlights) as a kid but by about 10 I was a solid brown hair.
Eye genetics is more complex than the simple “brown is dominant over blue” thing you hear repeated all the time in textbooks (and this thread). You can, for example, sometimes get brown eyes even when both parents have blue eyes. There are two main genes OCA2 and HERC2, with several different alleles available for both genes, plus a whole string of other genes that have smaller effects. And eye color of course isn’t limited to “blue” and “brown” but has a variety of greens and hazels, and occasionally other colors.
And, as you note, eye color tends to darken with age as melanin production comes online.
So basically there’s no clear way to answer this for precisely.
There are AT LEAST 16 different genes that contribute to the colour of your eyes. Scientists think there might be more.
Producing melanin (like in your skin) gets you brown over blue. But the consistency of the goopy stuff changes the way light refracts and can give green instead of blue. Plus all the others genes having some input too.
So yeah, brown beats blue is not gonna cut it. Two blue eyed parents can have a brown eyed child. And not all brown/blue eyes are the same either.
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