Baby Eye Color Calculator

Yes. Brown is dominant, so a brown-eyed parent can carry a hidden blue allele. If both parents carry one, there is roughly a 1 in 4 chance at the main eye color gene that the baby inherits two non-brown copies. Blue-eyed grandparents make this more likely, because they show that a parent must carry the recessive allele.

In the simple two-gene model, no: blue-eyed parents carry only non-brown alleles, so every child is blue-eyed. In real life it is rare but possible, because eye color is influenced by many genes and some variants that reduce pigment are not simply dominant or recessive. This calculator follows the simple model and shows 100% blue.

From both equally. A baby receives one copy of each gene from each parent, so neither parent's eye color counts more. What matters is which alleles each parent carries, including hidden recessive ones, not whether they are the mother or the father.

Only roughly. The two-gene model explains much of the difference between brown and blue eyes in people of European ancestry, but it cannot capture the dozen or more genes that fine-tune shade, nor hazel, amber or grey precisely. Use the percentages as an illustration of how inheritance works, not a prediction to rely on.

Many babies, especially of European ancestry, are born with blue or grey eyes because the iris has not yet produced much melanin. Pigment builds up over the first months, so eyes may darken to green, hazel or brown. Most of the change happens in the first year, and eye color is usually settled by about age three.

Brown is by far the most common eye color worldwide, held by an estimated 70 to 80 percent of people. Blue is most common in northern and eastern Europe, and green is the rarest of the three main colors, seen in only about 2 percent of people globally.

They are the alleles in the two-gene model. At the first gene, B gives brown eyes and is dominant over b. At the second gene, G gives green and is dominant over g, which gives blue. So any genotype with a B is brown, bb with at least one G is green, and only bb gg is blue.

A parent's eye color does not reveal whether they carry a hidden recessive allele. If a brown-eyed parent's mother or father has blue eyes, that parent must have inherited a non-brown allele from them, which raises the chance of a light-eyed baby. The calculator works this out from the grandparents you enter.

The simple model only has three outcomes. Hazel is grouped with green, as both come from a moderate amount of pigment, and grey is grouped with blue, as both have very little. If a parent's eyes are hard to classify, try both options to see how much the result depends on it.