NLSY blogging: Eye and hair color of Americans
So sayeth Aggro in the thread down below:
“They should have measured eye and hair color — we don’t have any representative data! Seriously, they’ll take extra long to measure all kinds of weird things that only an anthropometer would know of, but not eye and hair color.”
I too have previously lamented this odd failure in easy measurement. A literature search had me coming up short for an adequate published sample of American eye and hair color. The best estimate I could cobble together from several small studies was that about 25% of American whites were blond. But, Ho Ho!, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth is online and carries these simple treasures within its bosom.
The following hair and eye color information was self-reported in 1985 by a representative sample of those born between 1957-1965 (ages 20-28; currently 43-51). I’ve included blacks and Hispanics for the gender breakdown:
The first observation is that blond hair is exhibited by a little less than 20% of the white population; smaller than the estimates mentioned above. Second, consistent with Razib’s previous look at published data from Iceland and the Netherlands, blue eyes are more common in men than in women. Also like the European data, green eyes are more common in women, though the NLSY difference is not as extreme. Blond hair is also more common in females. The trend in all three groups is for females to report lighter hair pigmentation; 66% of white males report darker hair, compared with 55% of females, and both black and Hispanic females are much more likely than men to report ‘brown’ hair instead of ‘black’. Unfortunately, since the data are self-reported it’s difficult to know how much of this is subjective. Is this a further example of lighter pigmentation in women, or does sexual dimorphism in pigmentation lead men and/or women to view their own pigmentation as more “sex-typical”?
I was also curious about how these figures differ for various European-American ancestries:
English ancestry Americans and German Americans are very similar for eye and hair color. Hair color is somewhat darker with the French and Irish, and much darker for Italians. Eye color is not darker for the Irish, but is again somewhat darker for the French, and much darker for the Italians.
Finally, we’ve also discussed the link between personality, behavior, and light pigmentation before, so I took some quick, rough looks to see if there was any signal within the English/German sample. The answer is: not from what I could see. There were no meaningful differences between dark and light haired people in getting in trouble with the police, in getting into physical fights at school or work, or in pregnancy before marriage.
Labels: anthropometry, human biodiversity, NLSY, Pigmentation
In a way, I am surprised that there is nothing behavioural to distinguish red haired people.
There is a certain type of red haired and freckly person that looks ‘syndromal’ in the sense that such individuals resemble other red haired and freckly persons more than they resemble the other (non-red haired) members of their own family.
I’d be surprised if such red-heads didn’t exhibit some kind of behavioural difference – tho’ I’m not sure what it would be, and it might differ in men and women.
Or there might be some sexual selection going on in relation to women but not men – since there are clearly quite a few men who find red hair attractive in women but fewer women who find red hair atractive in men.
Maybe the reason there haven’t been a lot of surveys is that it’s too easy to get hair and eye color from driver’s license files? Granted, the breakdown isn’t as fine, but it’s there.
John Roth
I’m surprised that there are more white men with blue eyes than brown, and that the number of non-brown-eyed whites of either sex is much larger than the brown-eyed.
Are genuinely green eyes that common? Or is it just an affectation to call blue, grey, or hazel eyes ‘green’ if they have even a hint of green in them? I have very seldom seen eyes I would describe as green, and in statistics for eye colour in England (e.g. the classic BAAS survey) it isn’t even listed as a category. Maybe there is a difference in American and British usage on this point?
Having just searched Google Images for ‘green eyes’ I would admit that green eyes do occasionally occur, like that famous Afghan girl (whose eyes I would describe as turquoise), but allowance also has to be made for the deceptions of colour photography, not to mention Photoshop.
I wonder if the people surveyed are truly representative of their parent countries. If English immigrants have come disproportionately from the east of the country (the -ssexs), wouldn’t that make them a little blonder than normal? It would be interesting to compare this data with some stuff from Europe. Is anybody aware of a similar study of European populations?
bgc, could you post an example or two? I can’t picture what your saying.
Neat! I don’t trust the sex diffs in hair color, though. They’re opposite of the diffs found when the interviewer rates the color. For whites, the diffs don’t appear huge, so it could be women lying. That seems even more likely for black and hispanic women — they don’t want to be seen as having “black” hair, so they’re more likely to say “brown” instead.
The eye color stuff looks the same as before, though, so women must not care too much about their eye color (and men probably have less of a preference for eye color than hair color, which is the reason why women would lie).
In conversation once, a Palestinian said to me “You blue-eyes…..” meaning, I assume, something like “You North Europeans and your American cousins…”.
Replying to keil – I can’t find any suitable illustrations – most of the hair looks dyed in the photos I saw (even the woman on the Wiki entry for red hair).
But I have lived in Scotland where there are many pale-skinned and freckly red-heads, of whom many carry the MC1R mutation
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v11/n3/abs/ng1195-328.html
Rees has suggested the sexual selection idea – The American Journal of Human Genetics, volume 75 (2004), pages 739?751
But my point is that these probable MC1R mutant redheads look like siblings – in the same kind of way that Down’s syndrome kids look like siblings (but less obviously so) – in other words the gene is presumably pleiotropic and has visible effects in addition to hair and skin color – eg effects on facial bone structure.
It would be plausible (although maybe not necessarily likely) that there might also be effects of the mutation on behaviour.
In Scotland there is a folk belief that red hair is associated with a ‘hot temper’; so one place to look might be personality traits (eg. high psychoticism/ low conscientiousness) or statistical indices of aggression/ violence.
Just might be worth a look, that’s all.
So what are green eyes? The parents of this childith%2520green%2520eyes.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.theweberhome.com/photo.htm&usg=__XW nKB1sag7WSTY_5pS3jjOzYgA4=&h=2304&w=3072&sz=226&hl=en&start=49&tbnid=cZ gnJFpqHEkRnM:&tbnh=113&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3 Dgreen%2Beyes%26start%3D 40%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20 %26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.theweberhome.com/images/Sydney%2520w
(second photo down) evidently think she has green eyes, but to me they look a fairly ordinary blue.
bgc – I think I know what you mean – there’s a kind of boniness to the face, particularly in the forehead and running off the nose to the sides. There’s some pictures here that kind of illustrate it.
Great post. I’m wondering if there’s any data out there for Scottish, or are they lumped in with the English and the Irish? I made the mistake asking a “black Irish” friend of mine if his country was overrun with gingers, and he replied somewhat annoyed that red hair and freckles was a Scottish thing.
Regarding whether the populations are representative of their countries of origin, racial reality’s page on Italians puts the rate for blondes at 6% in the south, which is half of what is found in this sample for all Italian-Americans. Eye blondism for southern Italians – which I suppose refers to everything other than brown and black – is put at 56%, which is higher than the 48% in this sample. So if the Coon source from racial reality is accurate, it seems that darker Italians were more likely to settle in the United States.
David B,
Yes, true Green eyes are not that plentiful – my wife has them. When I was a kid I had them, but they became more Hazel over time.
One of my sisters has Gray/Blue eyes, but she insists they are Green.
bgc,
My wife has Red hair, but very few freckles – she’s Italian/German – but she does have the Red haired temperament!
My mother (half German, half Northern Italian) has beautiful green eyes, as does one of my sisters (half Sicilian, quarter German, quarter N. Italian). When we were little my sister used to refer to her eyes as “forest green” and my eyes as “dogsh*t brown.” Damn shame her beautiful green eyes couldn’t keep her out of the slammer! HA.
A lot of people with hazel eyes consider them green. I have pale green eyes (which occasionally look blue if I wear pale blue) and people usually comment on how unusual they are. My daughter has hazel eyes, meaning darker green with some amber/brown near the pupil; we call them hazel rather than green but a lot of people would probably consider them green.
As far as red hair, well, I am a natural strawberry-blonde with freckles, and I am of mixed Scottish/Irish/German/English ancestry (among many other things as well!) From my own observation, I always thought Scots tended too look rather different from Irish (despite both being stereotyped as pale, pasty, and freckled) — Irish often seem to be darker and more round-faced, whereas Scots seem to often be more angular of feature and lighter of complexion – blonde or redhaired. I figured it was due to more Norse influence on the genepool?
We have, within our family, noted a certain strain of stubbornness and fiery temper which appears to be linked to those with red hair (or perhaps it is just those Scots-Irish genes manifesting themselves…)
Red hair in Ireland is largely a western and rural thing. There are towns in rural western Ireland I’ve visited where it couldn’t be far off 50% of the population in my estimation. Not very common in Dubliners and the surrounding area (where a huge bulk of the Irish actually live) who are possibly even less red headed than the English average. From extensive experience I can say that Dubliners are less red headed than Ulster Prods and even less so than northern Catholics.
By Coonology red hair is a leftover from the pre-neolithic people displaced by the long barrow etc. waves of people who built all the “henges” and the like, hence why red hair is found amongst somes groups of the Berbers in the Atlas mountains who are allegedly an island of pre-neolithic expansion people. It was also recorded amongst the Guanches of the Canary Islands, for allegedly the same reason – i.e. they were sheltered from the neolithic expansion of dark haired people from the Middle East.
In Ireland localized inbreeding might explain red hair prevelence in rural areas better than Coonology.
Immigration of non-Irish to the east and to Dublin is an equally valid explanation. Especially considering the history of those parts.
I have no doubt that high rates of red hair in the Isles is partially due to founder effect, but to suggest recent inbreeding is not warranted. Red hair is a perfectly natural feature in cloud covered northern areas, not a pathology of the inbred.
keil, read a population genetics textbook. inbreeding doesn’t necessarily denote pathology. if you have a recessive allele in a deme, fragment it into smaller demes, then random drift will result in its increase in frequency in some demes and decrease in others (with the aggregate frequency remaining about the same). hard-weinberg takes care of rest as in high frequency demes the trait manifests itself.
pretty disappointed i had to make what i was getting at explicit on this weblog. jesus.
John Beddoe’s Victorian classic ‘The Races of Britain’ gives data from personal observation on hair and eye colour in many towns and villages in Ireland. Red hair is usually around 5% of the population, and seldom above 10%. Beddoe doesn’t give county totals, so it is difficult to detect any regional trend, though some of the figures for County Kerry seem quite high. The Irish percentages are not obviously higher than those in Scotland and England. I don’t put much weight on Beddoe’s figures, but even less on casual unquantified observations, including my own. My own casual impression from a few visits to Ireland is that genuine blond hair is much more common than in England, contrary to expectation, but this may just be an illusion due to a few striking cases.
David B,
Interesting you see Kerry as more red haired, as having spend 2 summers in the West Kerry as a teenager, my observation would be that the people there are the darkest, both in hair and complexion, in Ireland.
IMO, red hair is most frequent in Clare, Mayo and the North Midlands, whereas blonde hair is most frequent in the Limerick/Tipperary area, and the North Midlands.
I’ve heard most Italian immigrants to America were Sicilian.
Could anyone link to pics of red-haired berbers? I’ve seen the blonde ones from when that British kid went missing and people thought some Berbers had taken it because of some picture.
Looks like the little Berber girl on the left has red hair in this pic, but kind of hard to tell.
I met a red-haired, freckly-skinned Egyptian once. He needed to wear a big old-lady hat on the beach to protect himself. I incredulously pressed him, and he insisted his family is all as native Egyptian as it gets.
Beddoe’s Races of Britain and Hrdli?ka’s Physical Anthropology of the Old Americans are both full-view on Google books. So we have turn of the century hair and eye color for America and Western Europe.
Also, Maurice Fishberg’s Physical Anthropology of the Jews from 1903.
Blue eyes for NY Jews:
Men 24.08% Women 19.65% (males more blue)
And Jewish blue eyes by country (compared with NLSY sample):
US 22% vs 32%
England 16% vs 33%
Germany 19% vs 35%