To think dark brown eyes aren’t common in white British people

[Runaway3444]

Ds1 has dark brown eyes and due to his skin tone people just assume he’s white British rather than having a Middle Eastern father. My other children have a darker skin tone so people believe them. Aibu to think most people with dark brown eyes are usually from minority ethics background.

My DC are of white ethnicity and have incredibly dark brown eyes and very pale skin. No one has ever commented on it as being unusual, although people often comment on my quite bright green eyes, they seem to find that more unusual these days.

Eh? Nope. Know plenty of white British people with dark brown eyes.
My mixed son has hazel eyes.

If you have brown eyes but carry the blue gene and your partner had brown eyes but carries the blue gene, it is like playing snap if one puts brown and one blue, brown always wins. If you both put blue, blue wins. So will more often than not be brown.

Eh loads of Europeans e.g. Spanish, Italian, Greek have brown eyes. And of course British people too. You can't judge ethnicity by eye colour really.

I have green eyes. My Ds1 has hazel eyes with a fleck in the one which I think is unusual. If im honest I cant quite tell what his true eye colour is. He told me one of the kids at school asked why his eyes were different colours. My DS2 has blue eyes. DS1 always says he wishes he had eyes like DS2 which I think is sweet. Blue is his favourite colour 👀

@Embracingthechaos

"White British" doesn't really mean much.

Brown is the most common eye colour in Britiain. British people tend to be a complicated mish-mash of all sorts of things, ethnically speaking.

Least common, not most common.

YABU both my ex and our DS1 have dark brown eyes. All of us are white

I just had my DD who's doing Biology A-level explain how it works

For example I have hazel eyes and her Dad has blue. I had assumed that she would have hazel because blue is not a dominant colour, but she explained that the genes come in pairs, so in me because my Dad had blue eyes I carry the blue gene even though the Hazel colour dominates it. Therefore my child had inherited a blue gene from me and her Dad's blue gene, giving her blue eyes, if she had inherited my hazel gene it would dominant her Dad's blue and she would have had hazel

I am very confused about your point.
Lots of lovely very dark eyes in my family but sorry I am really not getting your point!

Whole family has very dark brown eyes and dark brown hair. English. Odd one out is me, with very green eyes.

@CatbearAmo

I second that it's almost genetically impossible for two blue eyed parents to have a brown eyed child.

Not totally impossible. It's unusual, but not impossible.

Reasonable explanation from what I understand

Dh has a cousin who is definitely a brown eyed child of blue eyed parents. She is so like her df in all other ways you wouldn't question it.
She has the deepest brown eyes and as far as they know there is nothing genetic in her heritage other than "white British".
Interestingly two of her dc have the same brown eyes, and the third is blue eyed like the dad.

I am surprised at people claiming to be completely Anglo Saxon. It's a period of history that I'm reading a lot about at the moment, and finding it absolutely fascinating. How do you know that you are so Anglo Saxon without the Celtic, Viking, Norman, Irish... ancestry that is far more typical?

Brown is still more common, but in our family it It has changed within a generation. My mum & I have brown eyes, but my mum's dad had blue eyes. I have had 3 kids, all three have blue eyes so that is my brown eye gene gone.

My much younger sister has really dark brown eyes, much darker than mine ( different dad, half Italian ) her daughter has the same really dark eye colour. So our mum's brown eye gene could still be there or she could have passed on our granddad's blue eye gene.

Will be interesting if my niece has children, she goes on to have children with brown or blue eyes? Her half sisters have different blue eye genes from their parents, so there is another blue eye gene possibility there too.

I find eye colour genes so fascinating. I would have loved to have the individual eye colour genes listed on our family tree alongside name & birth details. We have a very detailed family tree, in part going back hundreds & hundreds of years ( one line turned out to be very noble, ending up royal and fully recorded way, way back).

Am I alone in never noticing people’s eye colour unless it is very striking?

I couldn’t tell you what colour eyes my parents or closest friends have, except one who has very very dark brown eyes despite being white.

One little girl I know has very pale skin, bright blue eyes and blonde curls. Dad is mixed race.

My English mum has brown eyes and my Italian dad has blue eyes
After doing an ancestry dna test we found out our mum has French and west African heritage!
" white british" is a very broad spectrum!

It is hard for anyone to be sure. I have had a DNA test. I have also done all bits of the family tree back to the 1700s ( all born in UK or Ireland) and I am 3% Neanderthal DNA to boot. In our case we seem to be mostly celtit whatever that is (anyway Irish/Scottish) with English to an extent and 2% Nordic - probably those pesky vikings who kept coming over to NE England where I was born never mind the Orkney where ancestors were born in the 1700s.

..celtic..

My black cousin has clear light blue eyes. By your rule people should assume she’s white, because that’s the skin colour her eyes match?

This is not an AIBU. Statistically, the most common eye colour in the UK is blue. It's not a matter of opinion.

The majority of the world has brown eyes, humans all started off with brown eyes and every other colour is a generic mutation.

*genetic obvs.

Most of my family has brown eyes. My Dad’s side are French and Jewish so all have olive skin, dark brown hair and eyes. My mum has white blonde hair and dark brown eyes which is an interesting mix. My DC aren’t mixed race but two have brown eyes, two have hazel and baby has bright blue but I’m sure that will change perhaps to green like mine.

I have 4 (full) siblings. All Caucasian. 3 of us have dark brown eyes. 2 have blue.

Hahaha what🤣

@Mrsfrumble I did an introduction to welsh language course at the welsh centre in London pre lockdown. I’m not welsh but most people there had at least one welsh parent. I looked around the room and it was striking how the majority were brunette with brown eyes.

It's not surprising that people base their guesses on ethnicity on primarily skin-tone. As long as they understand that their guesses may be incorrect and behave accordingly, I don't see the problem.

As for noticing eye-colour, I can almost always remember if someone has either dark or light eyes, but my husband rarely notices. He notices and remembers how someone's lips/teeth look, the weirdo!