What is the most beautiful eye color? Maybe not the one you’re thinking of…
Is beauty only a question of subjectivity? Those who look into the question a little know that no, and that there is an element of social construction in everything that relates to beauty. Authors like Kant, Saint-Augustin or Bourdieu have a lot to say on the subject, but let’s just keep in mind that we can have a fairly common opinion of what is beautiful in a culture or society.
In a recent study, a contact lens seller, the UK-based company Lensstore, conducted a very interesting experiment. Researchers used photos of a man and a woman to create different “profiles” on three different dating apps. But there is a mischief: they manipulated the color of the eyes of these characters, changing them from blue, brown, green, hazel, black, to purple. The goal of the maneuver was to determine the impact of this variation on the success of these profiles in the world of online dating.
The results are significant: among women, hazel eyes are the most popular, garnering 20.19% of preferences, far ahead of other colors. Blue, green, brown and black were at the back of the pack. Among men, the data is quite different: the most attractive eye color turned out to be blue precisely, obtaining 27.17% of matches, but very close to brown with close with 21.97%, while Green garnered 16.46%. Hazelnut, very popular among women, falls to 15.03%, just ahead of black at 10.98%.
The little game of dating sites is fun. But if we look at studies with a larger panel and more scientific methodologies, another color emerges quite unanimously.
The most desired eye color is…
Imagine that the beauty of eye color is a subject on which a real majority emerges. Several surveys with the largest samples give fairly homogeneous results. And the eye color considered the most beautiful is green according to these studies. One such online survey was conducted recently by “All about vision” among 66,000 people. They were asked about the most attractive eye color according to them. Here are their preferences:
1. Green: 20.3%
2. Light blue: 16.9%
3. Hazelnut: 16%
4. Dark blue: 15.2%
5. Gray: 10.9%
6. Honey: 7.9%
7. Amethyst: 6.9%
8. Brown: 5.9%
If green emerges from the very large majority of opinion studies, there is a reason, as highlighted by this expert blog dedicated to the eye which mentions one of these surveys: the green color is the rarest in the world, only 2% of the world population has green eyes. Rare and therefore precious? In France, this represents around 1.5 million people.