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Question:Hi! You guys may or may not know the answer to this but I'll give it a shot. My 6 month old daughter has olive green eyes, fair skin and very light brown hair, the color of sand. My other 4 children have dark brown eyes, olive skin and dark to medium brown hair. I have dark brown eyes and hair, olive complexion. My husband has blue eyes, medium brown hair and an olive complexion. There is no one in our extented family that has olive green eyes. Where would my daughter's eye color have come from?


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Hi! You guys may or may not know the answer to this but I'll give it a shot. My 6 month old daughter has olive green eyes, fair skin and very light brown hair, the color of sand. My other 4 children have dark brown eyes, olive skin and dark to medium brown hair. I have dark brown eyes and hair, olive complexion. My husband has blue eyes, medium brown hair and an olive complexion. There is no one in our extented family that has olive green eyes. Where would my daughter's eye color have come from?

I just wrote the following response to another question on eye color. But it also applies to skin color and even hair color as all have to do with the amount of eumelanin (and in the case of skin and hair color, pheomelanin) production in the individual. The xMelanin "genes" are the same, but the minor genes and other mechanisms differ for skin and hair than for eyes.

Eye color is determined by the concentration of eumelanin in the stroma and the epithelium as well as the cell density of the stroma.

There is a genetic basis to eye color but it isn't a simple dominant/recessive as in humans, there are three major genes that impact eye color - they are commonly known as EYCL1, EYCL2 and EYCL3. The combination of these help establish base colors of green, blue and brown. But there are many other genes that have minor effects (this results in a lot of shades) and there are other non-gene based mechanisms that influence it as well.

One recently discovered by NIH was a single nucleotide polymorphism that occurs near the OCA2 gene.

So eye color is not the result of a single gene or even JUST genes. It is a very complex process.

But if you want to just consider eumelanin production as the result of genes, then parents with brown eyes (lots of eumelanin production) can have children of any eye color - but parents with blue eyes (low eumelanin production) would be LESS LIKELY, but not impossible, to produce offspring with brown eyes. But this is still using an artificially simplistic basis.

my daughter is the exact same way...i have blue eyes and my husband has brown ...it must be a mix of the two that make a green!

I think this link will give you the answer:

http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?...

In short: eye color genetics is not as general as we are taught. There are many genes that goes into generating the color. Even 2 blue eye parents can produce a brown eye child if the combination works out that way.

Also, mutations can happen resulting in different results.