Yes, blue eyed redheads are very rare!

Having blue eyes and red hair is the rarest combination in the World. Most natural redheads have brown eyes, followed by hazel or green shades.

Red hair and blue eyes explained

Red hair and blue eyes are both distinctive physical traits that can make an individual stand out in a crowd. But what makes them so unique? In this blog post, we’ll explore the science behind red hair and blue eyes and answer in more detail the question: are red hair and blue eyes rare?

Only 1-2% of the global population has natural red hair

Firstly, let’s talk about red hair. Red hair is caused by a genetic variant that affects the production of melanin, the pigment that gives hair its colour. Specifically, people with red hair have a mutation in the MC1R gene, which leads to lower levels of eumelanin (the pigment that produces brown or black hair) and higher levels of pheomelanin (the pigment that produces red or ginger hair). It’s estimated that only around 1-2% of the global population have natural red hair, making it a relatively rare trait.

Around 8% of the global population has blue eyes

Now let’s turn our attention to blue eyes. Like red hair, blue eyes are also caused by a genetic variant that affects the production of melanin. However, in the case of blue eyes, the variant affects the amount of melanin in the iris, the coloured part of the eye. Specifically, blue-eyed individuals have less melanin in their irises than people with brown or green eyes. It’s estimated that around 8% of the global population has blue eyes, making them less rare than red hair but still relatively uncommon.

The rarest hair and eye colour combination

So what are the rarest hair and eye colour combinations? Red hair and blue eyes are the rarest combination to find together.

Red hair and blue eyes occurs in only 0.17% of the global population

According to one estimate, the combination of red hair and blue eyes occurs in only around 0.17% of the global population. This makes it a particularly unique combination of traits that can make an individual stand out in a crowd. 

Why is red hair with blue eyes so rare?

There is a gene called OCA2 which determines how much melanin is in the iris, which is the coloured part of your eye. It does this by controlling how much P protein is produced. For people with blue eyes, which is a recessive trait, they have very little P protein, so you need two nonfunctional copies of the OCA2 gene to give a person blue eyes. If a person has two functional copies of OCA2, their eye colour is  more likely to be a shade of green/hazel/ brown.

But there’s an additional genetic profile that makes the combination of red hair and blue eyes even more rare, in fact the rarest of them all. This involves another gene variant, HERC2, which interacts with both the MC1R gene and the OCA2 gene and can shut off the redhead gene while allowing the expression of blue eyes and blonde hair. This makes the combination of blue eye and red hair even more unlikely to be seen!

Conclusion

Red hair and blue eyes are both rare physical traits caused by genetic variations affecting melanin production, with both being recessive traits, so having parents that can pass on two sets of recessive genes is very unlikely. In most cases, you’d have blue eyes and hair somewhere on the spectrum of blond to brown, or red hair with brown, hazel or green eyes. This is what makes the combination of red hair and blue eyes particularly unique, and why it only occurs in a small fraction (0.17%) of the global population.

And don’t forget to check out other articles in our Ginger Red Hair Facts category.