ACCORDING TO GOOGLE’S SEARCH statistics, the late Hollywood actress Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes are the most Googled in the world, with a staggering 27,100 global searches per month for the term “Elizabeth Taylor eyes”. By comparison, Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan comes in second, with 6,000 monthly searches for her sea-green eyes, music celebrity Rihanna takes third with 4,400 searches, while Megan Fox, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus are all joint third with 2,400 searches about their real eye colour. Altogether, the various searches about Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes and eye colour amount to over 325,000 online queries per year.

TAYLOR EYES DEFECTIVE

Taylor, who starred in the movies ‘Cat On A Hot Tin Roof’, ‘Cleopatra’ and ‘Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf’, and who was married a total of eight times, died of heart failure on March 23, 2011, at the age of 79. She was widely considered to be one of the most beautiful actresses of her era — assisted not simply by her mesmeric eyes, by also by a rare genetic defect that gave her two layers of eyelashes — the result of an abnormal development of the FOXC2 gene.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR EYES: VIOLET OR BLUE?
Part of the reason for the continued global popularity of Taylor’s eyes is due to ‘Elizabeth Taylor Violet Eyes’ — a perfume named after her, which launched in 2010 and that many Internet users are actually looking for in search, as opposed to general information about her eyes or eye colour. The second reason for Liz Taylor’s eye popularity lies within their apparent and unusual purple colour, which many adoring fans and journalists have eulogised for over half a century.

But what colour were Elizabeth Taylor's eyes? The answer is, they were not purple, as many believe, but dark blue, and merely appeared to be a purple colour when exposed to lighting, make-up, particular hues of clothing or as a result of photographic re-touching. True purple coloured eyes are extremely rare, and almost always occur in people with albinism — the condition in which a person is born with little or no pigment in their eyes, skin or hair. Albinos possess low levels of melanin, the natural substance that determines pigment. It is this deficiency that creates purple eyes.

BLUE IS THE COLOUR
By contrast, Taylor’s naturally dark blue eyes will have formed with more melanin than is present in purple coloured eyes. In fact, new research published in 2008 in the journal ‘Human Genetics’ suggested that people like Taylor with blue eyes all descended from a single common ancestor who lived in the North Western part of the Black Sea region during the Neolithic period, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Within Google’s league table of eye popularity today’s celebrities fall way behind Elizabeth Taylor’s scores. Perhaps the next move for second placed Rihanna would be to bring out her own fragrance, entitled “Rihanna Green Eyes”, to boost her to the top spot.

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