I’m questing about for some answers. My daughter is now two months old, and to the left is an image of her eye. As you can see, they are blue. I was not particularly surprised that she was born with blue eyes. Her mother is of Northern European heritage. But, I’ve had both of us genotyped. My daughter is a heterozygote on the HERC2-OCA2 locus, which means that she has a 5% chance of blue eyes, 35% green/hazel, and 60% chance of brown, assuming a European genetic background. Obviously half her ancestry is non-European, so that does not hold (though for gene nerds, I am a homozygote for the “European” alleles of SLC24A5, as are many South Asians).
My question here is simple: of the half-browns with one Northern European parent, what color were their eyes at birth, and what colors did they change to over time, if they changed at all? I have a friend who is half Bengali and Irish, and he and his brother have green eyes, and were born with green eyes. My friend Jason Goldman has the same genotype as my daughter on the HERC2-OCA2 locus, but his baby blues disappeared after 2 weeks.
What I want in the comments are details about eye color and transitions, as well as parental ethnicity (I am not too surprised, for example, that one of Nikki Haley’s children has blue eyes as an adolescent).
If you are curious as to why I’m so curious. First, I’m a brown guy who is running around with a little baby with blue eyes. Second, people know of my fixation on genetics. So naturally questions will ensue.
(for further information, her hair color is medium brown; mine is black, her mother’s is blond).