Beauty norm shifts as blue eyes diminish


Good ol’ blue eyes, Frank Sinatra, was known not only for his charm and voice, but also for something he owed solely to genetics: his baby blues.

Blue eyes have long been alluring, in part because of their rarity: One must receive two recessive blue alleles — one from each parent — in order to exhibit the trait.

Interestingly, research conducted by Dr. Yazhu Ling, who performed a study on color preferences, has shown that there seems to be a universal preference to the color blue in general — evolutionarily, blue signals clear weather and a good water source, among other things.

However, studies show blue eyes are becoming increasingly rare, leading us to question how this will shape the traditionally unshakable Western beauty norm in the United States.

Where did blue eyes come from? And why have they stuck around? A recent study by researchers in Denmark reports that all blue-eyed people have one common ancestor, whose genes mutated 6,000 to 10,000 years ago in an area in the Balkans or near the Black Sea. Humans originally all had brown eyes prior to this. The study was led by Hans Eiberg, who traced the phenotype of blue eyes back to one specific area near a gene which affects melanin production. Blue eyes can, in effect, be seen as diluted brown eyes.

But if Darwin’s theories are to be believed, populations vary when mutations create new alleles and they are passed onto offspring through genes because of some evolutionary advantage they possess. If blue eyes came from one ancestor, why were they passed on — why were they favored?

It has been suggested that blue eyes, like lighter skin, provide an advantage to those living in colder climates because lower melanin levels allow for more vitamin D absorption from the sun. Some have also argued that at some point there was a genetic bottleneck where some survivors were blue eyed, passing on the gene through the population at a higher rate than it would have previously.

Nevertheless, these hypotheses remain untested and we are still left wondering why blue eyes have persisted, and why they are so often favored.

A study led by Dr. Bruno Laeng at the University of Tromso in Norway theorizes that blue-eyed mates are more attractive to blue-eyed men because it provides a man the evolutionary advantage of ensuring paternity in his blue-eyed child.

The researchers tested a group of 88 college students and showed them images of male and female models, whose eye colors were digitally manipulated to be blue or brown. The students were then asked to rank the photos by attractiveness on a scale of one to five, and the study found that blue-eyed men preferred blue-eyed women, rating them an average of 3.29, as opposed to 2.79 for the brown-eyed women.

While cultural factors could influence the results of the study, Laeng’s theory has legitimate anthropological reasoning. Why should males waste resources nurturing genes that aren’t their own? One need only look to the phenomenon of infanticide in primates to see the lengths that males of some species go to in order to promote their genes over those of other males.

While we may not know the exact evolutionary reasons as to why blue eyes have endured, they do seem to possess a certain allure. Carolyn Kaufman of Otterbein College in Ohio speculated that when people see something pleasurable, their eyes dilate to signal happiness; since dilated pupils are easier to see in lighter eyes, blue eyes could have a natural appeal. And blue eyes have long been the subject of fascination — regarded as preferable in Europe as far back as the Middle Ages, according to Face Value, a book by Hema Sundaram about the history of beauty.

But to say that blue eyes and fair skin are favored in the area where they may have originated seems only to say that there is cultural preference for eye color, and nothing more. One could extrapolate this idea to our country of America, and say that Americans also have such a preference, as our European founders came from the same location as did blue eye color.

However, as the cultural tides of the US change, it seems that blue eyes are becoming increasingly rare, attributable to immigration patterns, intermarriage and genetics. At the turn of the 20th century, about half of Americans born had blue eyes, but by the mid-century, this proportion had dropped to about a third, and is now currently lingering around one-sixth.

Mark Grant, an epidemiologist who conducted a study on the declining rate of blue eyes in America, argues that a century ago more people married within their ethnic group — meaning that the recessively inherited blue eyes were easily passed down. By mid-century, however, the historic taboo of intermarriage between nationalities began to fade. From 1900 to 1950, about one in 10 Americans was nonwhite, but today that ratio is 35 percent, suggesting that the “unusual” decline of blue eyes in America has more to do with changing demographics and cultural stereotypes, rather than any kind of evolutionary advantage or disadvantage blue eyes may have.

As the world’s population continues to mix and mingle — with increasingly fluid travel between countries, more diversity in ethnic composition and greater exposure to other cultures — perhaps our beauty norms will shift, and blue eyes will disappear altogether.

Tiffanie Wu is a junior majoring in business administration and neuroscience.

3 replies
  1. Blue eyed
    Blue eyed says:

    We also learned in one of my anthropology classes that blue eyes let in more light than brown eyes. They were therefore an evolutionary advantage areas with short days and long winters because you could see better in dim lighting. Brown eyes let in less light, which is what you would want in Africa and the Mediterranean since excessive sunlight is bad for your eyes.

Comments are closed.