That is surprisingly common. We men have to face the fact that when we grow a beard, there’s a good chance it’ll be a different color than the stuff on top, or it will go gray sooner.
I have dark hair, but get lots of red in my beard. Or I did the last time I grew one-- probably mostly gray now!
I wonder if this happens because the parents in question look like they have blue eyes but maybe don’t really.
Take me, for example. Both my parents have blue eyes, so common wisdom says that I must as well. When I was a little kid, my eyes did look blue, a mid-range blue, which wasn’t quite the same shade of blue as my brother or parents’ eyes. When I hit my mid-teens, my eyes began to change color, and now range from gray to green, with the “default” being a light blue-green (with a dark blue outer ring and flecks of brown close to the pupil.)
When you look farther back than my parents, blue eyes only pop up 50% of the time: one set of grandparents was blue+hazel and the other blue+brown and there is even more brown when you go back farther. It seems possible that my eyes are actually a variety of hazel, even though they generally make people assume that they’re a shade of blue, or occasionally green.
If I had a child with a man whose eyes are like my own, it wouldn’t be too shocking if the child had a shade of brown.
Yeah… mine’s the same but now my beard is still mostly red – but with white patches – and all the hair on my head is gray. (It went gray after having a child… I’m sure there is a cause-effect thing going on). 