Celebrity Beauty: Bollywood Actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan Has The World's Most Popular Eyes: But What Is Their Real Colour?

THE EYES HAVE IT: Bollywood actress and former Miss World, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, has the most Googled eyes of any living celebrity. Many fans online assume that film celebrity's real eye color is brown, and that she wears colored contact lenses to turn brown eyes to green or blue. In fact, her eyes are a natural sea green - rare amongst South Asians.

NOT ONLY ARE BOLLYWOOD actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s eyes the most popular in the whole of India, but also the world. According to statistics supplied by Google, approximately 6,000 global Internet users per month type the phrase “Aishwarya Rai eyes” into their browsers each month. Most of these online fans are located in India, and the searches originate predominantly from the explosion of smartphones (rather than laptops of desktop computers) that is sweeping the country.

AISHWARYA RAI BACHCHAN'S EYES BEAT ALL

Aishwarya's online search figure is beaten only by the late Elizabeth Taylor, whose violet-coloured eyes draw 11,700 monthly searches. As the number one living celebrity, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan's eyes rank higher on Google search than those of Rihanna (4,400), Megan Fox (2,600), Lady Gaga (1,390), Angelina Jolie (1,480) and Kim Kardashian (1,880). It is a new phenomenon that a movie star from outside Britain or the US could reach such heights of global popularity.

But the key question is, what is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan's real eye colour? Are they blue, green or brown? In fact, the former Miss World and 'Vogue India' cover star's eyes are naturally green. “My eyes pick up different tones depending on what I am wearing,” she says. “It accentuates more blue or more green accordingly, so I’d say the colour was grey-green, like the sea.”

Madame Tussauds museum were true to the film celebrity's real eye color when they created a life-sized waxwork of the actress, unveiled in London in October 2004. Toy manufacturer Mattel followed suit five years later when they released an Indian Barbie doll fashioned on Rai Bachchan, and which also had her sea green eyes.

NATURAL BROWN, BLUE OR GREEN?

But despite this, many fans and haters still dispute her natural eye colour, partially on the grounds that her eyes have appeared as brown in many of her films — the result of contact lenses she was required to wear for the roles — and so they have assumed that this is her natural colour. The Internet is awash with YouTube postings and websites claiming that Rai Bachchan is a fraud, and deriding her for selling out, turning her brown eyes to green by wearing coloured contact lenses to deliberately alter her natural eye colour.

THE GENETICS OF EYE COLOuR

The other reason that many doubt that her eyes are naturally green is because they are unsure how it is possible for an Asian to possess eyes that are naturally different from the more ubiquitous brown hue. In truth, other colours do occur naturally within people of both African and Asian heritage. Genetically, there are two basic reasons that explain why; first, those with Caucasian relatives on both sides of their family are more likely to have non-brown eyes, as long as each parent is a carrier of the gene for the particular eye colour. This means that a couple who both have brown eyes could conceive a child whose eyes are blue or green, so long as this gene exists somewhere within their ancestry. Although the gene for green eyes is traditionally most commonly found in northern and central Europe, it is also present in parts of South Asia, such as Afghanistan, north Pakistan and north-western India.

Secondly, if a person has non-brown eyes and no Caucasian ancestry, it is likely to be the result of a rare form of genetic defect in which their primary eye colour genes have mutated, creating another pigment. Ocular albinism is one such form that takes place within eyes that do not make melanin — the substance that gives skin, hair and eyes their natural colour. Someone with no pigment production for example, will have blue eyes, whereas someone with a little will have green eyes, and someone with high concentrations will have brown eyes.