Grey eyes in the UK

[Fleetwood Mac]

Found this. Apparently Scots and Irish have the highest percentage of redheads in the world. I don't know about grey eyes, though.

http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/g...ds-in-pictures

I did have a look after I posted to see what % of people in Scotland have ginger hair and was staggered by the result.

With having Scottish family I've spent time up there and met plenty of Scots down here, and off the top of my memory they all seem to have dark hair; but clearly I'm wrong in this.

From recent studies conducted in the UK, the Scots have the highest % of red heads with 40% being gene carriers, but the North of England has 34% -the same as Ireland - and so the English % of red heads is diluted by the South because the concentration is in the North.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/10264427/Edinburgh-is-surprise-capital-of-redheaded-Britain-and-Ireland.html

And, I was also best man at an Irish mate's wedding and have been over there a few times with him to meet his family etc, and just for a holiday at times. Again I remember everyone being dark so there's clearly something wrong with my ability to take notice of ginger haired people!

[Zena]

Thanks for all the responses!

I get the feeling there aren't more grey-eyed people in the UK than anywhere else. Probably a literary device, as Errata suggests.

Rosella, good question about Archie, if he had grey eyes. But Elizabeth Ferrars sometimes has several people with grey eyes in a book. In the Andrew Basnett series, Andrew and his nephew both have grey eyes, which makes sense because they are related, but then other unrelated people pop up with grey eyes, too. (If you enjoy Christie, try Ferrars. I actually like her books better than Christie. Ferrars's plots twist and turn like Christie, but aren't quite as convoluted.)

Joshua Rogan, good point. I'll pay closer attention and note if a grey-eyed person is the killer from now on!

[Limehouse]

I am from the UK and I have grey eyes and my sister has green eyes. I'm a natural blonde but certainly not dumb. My husband is a red-head but not bad tempered at all.

Not all red-heads have ginger hair. My husband's hair (before it went grey) was auburn.

[Pcdunn]

Also, keep in mind some people's hair and eye color change over time. My mother told me that as a very young child I had blue eyes and auburn curls. She hoped I would be a blue-eyed redhead-- but, alas, my eyes darkened to brown and my hair became brunette.

My mother's heritage was English, French, Scottish, and German. My father's ancestry was Irish and German (from Luxembourg). She had brown hair and brown eyes, while he had dark hair and green/hazel eyes. The dark genes definitely ruled in our family!

[Errata]

I was a blonde aqua eyed southern Jew and that pretty much broke everyone I ever met, at least once. One of those things could not be true. I finally started dying my hair red at 16, and despite the fact that it was like, Nicole Kidman in Far and Away red, people stopped being appalling. They totally accepted that a Jew could look Irish. Not Norwegian, that was rank heresy. But Irish was somehow fine.

I had multiple people tell me that I couldn't be Jewish, because Jews were so smart, and I was too blonde. Like there was some scientific correlation between hair color or religion and IQ, and not a stereotype created in the 50s (by some of the smartest women ever to grace a stage or screen by the way).

If nothing else, I had an older sister who was ALSO a blonde blue eyed Jew. And despite the fact that these people met her first because she was born first, I was still treated like the only blonde Jew on the planet. Come to find out, people had no idea I even had a sister unless they went to my school. They just assumed we were both the same kid. I thought people just couldn't be bothered to differentiate between me and my sister's NAMES. Happens all the time. No they honestly thought there was only one girl. One of my Dad's cousins figured it out when I was 13, and only because he knew no one is Bat Mitzvah twice. THEN he suddenly put it all together (So much for the "all Jews are smart" theory). Now, he and I were both at my sister's Bat Mitzvah, so I never did find out what he thought the deal was with the other kid sitting with my parents. And we don't look at all alike, it should be said. We weren't even the same kind of blonde or the same blue eyes. Parade us past a drunk three hours apart and he would know we weren't the same kid. The only time people knew we were related is if my parents were with us, and they could see that resemblance. Mention we were Jewish and people decided we were one Unicorn who details they apparently kept getting wrong.

And there were a dozen blonde Jewish girls in my synagogue within a year of me in age. We all got it. Apparently blonde Jews can cause retrograde amnesia, because they were so surprised every! Single! Time!

It's no wonder I had a complicated relationship with my hair color.

[Scott Nelson]

You know, I never heard the "Bat" as "Bat" in Bat Miztzvah. I always heard it as "Bar." Weird. It must have something to do with hair color.

[Rosella]

Without going into 'Spoiler' territory, isn't Ruth Lessing (pun in the name) George's trusted secretary in 'Sparkling Cyanide,' dark haired and grey eyed?

[Graham]

My father's eyes (not the Eric Clapton song...) were grey, and when he had one on him, as he often did when I was a nipper, they scared me stiff. Another poster describes grey eyes as 'flashing and steely', and that exactly describes my old man's peepers - they bored into you. My brother and I are both brown haired (sorry, we both were brown haired) with brown eyes, as were many of the people I knew and know here in the English Midlands, where grey eyes don't seem all that common. My old man's family originated in the West Country, don't know if that matters regarding his grey eyes.

Graham

[GUT]

My father's eyes (not the Eric Clapton song...) were grey, and when he had one on him, as he often did when I was a nipper, they scared me stiff. Another poster describes grey eyes as 'flashing and steely', and that exactly describes my old man's peepers - they bored into you. My brother and I are both brown haired (sorry, we both were brown haired) with brown eyes, as were many of the people I knew and know here in the English Midlands, where grey eyes don't seem all that common. My old man's family originated in the West Country, don't know if that matters regarding his grey eyes.

Graham

Now that is interesting both dad and I have eyes that tend to grey [they actually change through varying shades of blue and at the lightest most people say they are grey] and his family originated in the West Country. Albiet they came to a Land Down Under about 4 generations back.

[Graham]

Now that is interesting both dad and I have eyes that tend to grey [they actually change through varying shades of blue and at the lightest most people say they are grey] and his family originated in the West Country. Albiet they came to a Land Down Under about 4 generations back.

My dad's mother (born Portsea Island 1873) also had grey eyes, same as his, and probably even more scary! I remember reading that grey-eyed actors were preferred for early black-and-white films, especially horror films, as such eyes were supposed to be more expressive....my dad's eyes usually expressed anger!

My mother's side of the family all had/have brown hair and brown eyes - her family were Huguenots from Ypres (modern Belgium) who came to England in the late 17th century - silk weavers in Whitechapel, originally.

Graham

[Mayerling]

You know, I never heard the "Bat" as "Bat" in Bat Miztzvah. I always heard it as "Bar." Weird. It must have something to do with hair color.

Hi Scott,

When a Jewish girl reaches thirteen she can have a bat mitzvah, while a Jewish boy can have a bar mitzvah.

Jeff

[Mayerling]

If nothing else, I had an older sister who was ALSO a blonde blue eyed Jew. And despite the fact that these people met her first because she was born first, I was still treated like the only blonde Jew on the planet. Come to find out, people had no idea I even had a sister unless they went to my school. They just assumed we were both the same kid. I thought people just couldn't be bothered to differentiate between me and my sister's NAMES. Happens all the time. No they honestly thought there was only one girl. One of my Dad's cousins figured it out when I was 13, and only because he knew no one is Bat Mitzvah twice. THEN he suddenly put it all together (So much for the "all Jews are smart" theory).
And there were a dozen blonde Jewish girls in my synagogue within a year of me in age. We all got it. Apparently blonde Jews can cause retrograde amnesia, because they were so surprised every! Single! Time!

It's no wonder I had a complicated relationship with my hair color.

Hi Errata.

While I can see the oddness of reverse stereotyping here, I have to point out that one can be bar/bat mitzvahed twice. When (and if) one reaches the age of 83 (three score years and ten is the Biblical length of time for the average human life) one can have a new bar/bat mitzvah. The actor Kirk Douglas had one such a number of years ago.

Jeff

[Robert]

George Burns must have had three.

[Penhalion]

I am primarily of British descent and I have grey eyes that sometimes look blue (depending on what I'm wearing) and naturally blonde hair with quite a bit of red in it (that I help along with some henna). I have quite a bit of Scottish in my background as well as Welsh and English. Very little Irish, though.