๐ How Rare Are You in Argentina?
๐ฆ๐ท Genetic Landscape of Argentina
Argentina is South America's most European-looking country, with roughly 85% of the population claiming European descent โ primarily Italian and Spanish, with significant German, British, and Eastern European contributions. Buenos Aires received more Italian immigrants than any city outside Italy. However, Indigenous and mestizo genetics remain significant, especially in the northern provinces. This creates one of Latin America's most phenotypically diverse populations, where blue-eyed blondes and dark-featured individuals are both 'typically Argentine.'
Surnames are a poor guide to any of it. Spanish names still head the national lists, though Italian ancestry runs at least as deep behind them, and a surname records one line while saying nothing about the rest. The better evidence sits in particular towns. Gaiman and Trevelin in Chubut keep Welsh chapels, choirs and tea houses, founded by families who sailed from Wales in the 1860s to hold on to their language. Entre Rรญos holds villages of Volga Germans who had already emigrated once, from Germany to Russia, before crossing the Atlantic. The slang of Buenos Aires, lunfardo, is thick with Genoese and southern Italian words. In the Chubut valley the yearly eisteddfod is still held, more than a century and a half after that first landing.
๐๏ธ The census question, and the column that got collapsed
The 2022 census was the first in Argentina to ask people how they perceive their own gender โ INDEC calls it the first census experience on the subject, and says Ley 26.743 de Identidad de Gรฉnero, sanctioned in 2012, is the law through which it assessed whether a census could measure this at all. Of the 45,618,787 people counted in private dwellings, 196,956 โ 0.4% โ said they do not identify with the sex registered at their birth: 72,510 varรณn trans / masculinidad trans, 60,679 mujer trans / travesti, 37,330 no binario, and 26,437 another answer or none. A further 69,831 preferred not to answer, and 2,746,871 are recorded as ignorado.
The DNI and the passport have carried a third option since Decreto 476/2021, published on 21 July 2021, which tells RENAPER to use F, M or X in the sex field. The census took an X as well, in its separate question about sex registered at birth, but a note under the published table says that category was redistributed between Mujer/Femenino and Varรณn/Masculino, on the basis of INDEC's quality and consistency review of the definitive results. One printed column does not hold what people answered.
๐๏ธ Eye Color
| Brown | 45% |
| Hazel | 15% |
| Green | 12% |
| Blue | 15% |
| Gray | 8% |
| Amber | 5% |
๐ Hair Color
| Dark Brown | 30% |
| Brown | 25% |
| Black | 22% |
| Blonde | 12% |
| Red | 3% |
| Gray | 8% |
๐ฉธ Blood Type
| O+ | 44% |
| A+ | 27% |
| B+ | 8% |
| AB+ | 3% |
| O- | 9% |
| A- | 5% |
| B- | 2% |
| AB- | 2% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets โ see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Argentina
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Argentina's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
๐ฒ Whose surname goes first, and who decides
Until 2015 the rule was blunt: article 4 of Ley 18.248, sanctioned on 10 June 1969, gave the matrimonial child of a mixed-sex couple the father's first surname. The mother's could be added on request. The Civil and Commercial Code replaced that law on 1 August 2015, and article 64 now says the child takes the first surname of either spouse โ and if the parents cannot agree on which, the order is settled by a draw held at the civil registry.
Given names come under the same texts. Ley 18.248 refused names it called 'extravagantes, ridรญculos, contrarios a nuestras costumbres' and foreign names outside a short list of exceptions. Article 63 of the Code keeps the limit of three given names and still bars extravagant ones, but expressly allows names that are indigenous or derived from indigenous and Latin American words. Rules like that sit behind any count of how rare a name is.
๐งฌ The grandparenthood index and the state DNA bank
Children were taken from their families under the military government of 1976 to 1983. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, founded in 1977, was looking for grandchildren whose parents were gone, which meant proving kinship without the generation in between. The Argentine geneticist Vรญctor Penchaszadeh, then exiled in the United States, put the group in touch with the American geneticist Mary-Claire King, and she and her team worked out the รญndice de abuelidad: a procedure that establishes a child's filiation from the genetic material of grandparents alone.
Ley 23.511, passed in 1987 under Raรบl Alfonsรญn, made that permanent as the Banco Nacional de Datos Genรฉticos, a state genetic archive; since Ley 26.548 of 2009 it has run as an autonomous body. The bank's own page says that from its founding it built a genetic database and ran thousands of analyses, and that more than 120 grandchildren have been identified as a result. Abuelas keeps its own count of resolved cases โ 140 as of September 2026 โ against the more than 500 disappeared children it was founded to look for. The two counts are not the same measure.
โญ Rare Facts About Argentina
What is institutional here, and what is not
The population is INDEC's Censo Nacional de Poblaciรณn, Hogares y Viviendas 2022, definitive results: 45,892,285 counted. The naming rules are the Civil and Commercial Code and Ley 18.248, which InfoLeg records as abrogated by Ley 26.994 with effect from 1 August 2015. The genetic bank figures come from the Banco Nacional de Datos Genรฉticos' own page on argentina.gob.ar and from Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. The eye and hair colour tables are not institutional โ the 2022 census does not record those traits and we found no official Argentine source that does, so they are estimates rather than measurements โ and we found no official national blood-group breakdown. Last checked September 2026.