What does Dark Blue Hair fade to?

Why do some Irish people have black hair and blue eyes?

The same reason Americans may, genetics, though not all do. I have known many Irish and still do that were not born here and some were blonde, some brown hair, some silver or grey, and some even Jet black hair.

Some had brown eyes while almost equal numbers had blue eyes and some green. I even know someone with one green eye and the other blue and brown, half and half. There are many reasons some have dark hair and blue eyes which normally begin with genetics, ancestry, or simply a mutated gene as my friend with mixed eye color.

There has been influencing of many cultures, Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts, and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country's western and northern fringes.

Black Irish is an ambiguous term sometimes used (mainly outside Ireland) as a reference to a dark-haired phenotype appearing in people of Irish origin.

However, Dark blue hair in people of Irish descent is common, although darker skin complexions appear less frequently.


One popular speculation suggests the Black Irish are descendants of survivors of the Spanish Armada, multiple ships from which were wrecked or made landfall on the western Irish coast in 1588; subsequent research has discredited such claims.

Filmmaker Bob Quinn, in the documentary series Atlantean, hypothesizes the existence of an ancient sea-trading route linking North Africa and Iberia to regions such as Connemara. With this hypothesis, Quinn explains phenotypical similarities between the "Atlantean Irish" and the populations of Iberia and the Berbers.

Quinn's Atlantean thesis has not been accepted by the Irish academic establishment, which has criticized it is as non-scholarly and lacking hard evidence to back his theories.