๐ How Rare Are You in Finland?
๐ซ๐ฎ Genetic Landscape of Finland
Finland is one of Europe's great genetic outliers โ the Finns are genetically distinct from their Scandinavian neighbors, carrying ancient Uralic genetic signatures from migration out of the Ural Mountains region. A population bottleneck ~4,000 years ago created the 'Finnish Disease Heritage,' a set of 36+ genetic conditions more common in Finland than anywhere else. Eastern and Western Finland have measurably different genetic profiles. The Sรกmi minority adds additional genetic distinctiveness.
A good share of the population descends from people who arrived where they now live in the 1940s. When Finland ceded Karelia, hundreds of thousands of Karelians were resettled across the rest of the country, carrying eastern dialects and eastern surnames into western parishes that had never heard them. Along the southern and western coast, and throughout the ร land Islands, Swedish is the everyday language and a co-official one nationally. In the far north three Sรกmi languages are used, and one of them, Inari Sรกmi, is spoken nowhere outside Finland at all. Being unusual in Finland is often less about ancestry than about which of these very small worlds a person happened to grow up in.
๐๏ธ What Finland Writes Down About a Person
The Finnish state keeps a file on every resident, and the published list of what goes in it is shorter than you would expect. The Population Information System is run by the Digital and Population Data Services Agency and covers Finnish citizens and foreign citizens living in Finland on a permanent or temporary basis. The personal data the agency says the system holds includes name, personal identity code, address, citizenship, native language, family relations and dates of birth and death. Nothing on that published list is an ethnicity, and nothing on it is a physical characteristic. Native language is one language per person, it rests on the person’s own declaration, and it can be changed later.
Those registers are the census. Finland ran its first entirely register-based population census in 1990, and the 2021 round was register-based too — assembled from administrative registers, among them the Population Information System, the Tax Administration’s incomes register and personal tax data, rather than from a census questionnaire. Statistics Finland dates the series behind all of it to 1749, when the first Finnish population statistics were compiled under the Swedish Tabellverket — which the office calls “the beginning of the world’s longest, continuous population statistics”. So the population figure on this page comes from a register. The eye and hair colour figures below cannot.
๐๏ธ Eye Color
| Blue | 60% |
| Gray | 10% |
| Green | 10% |
| Hazel | 12% |
| Brown | 8% |
๐ Hair Color
| Blonde | 28% |
| Brown | 28% |
| Dark Brown | 22% |
| Red | 3% |
| Black | 10% |
| Gray | 9% |
๐ฉธ Blood Type
| A+ | 36% |
| O+ | 32% |
| B+ | 10% |
| AB+ | 5% |
| A- | 6% |
| O- | 6% |
| B- | 3% |
| AB- | 2% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets โ see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Finland
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Finland'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 →
โ๏ธ Finland’s Five-Person Test for a First Name
Finland’s Act on Forenames and Surnames, in force since 1 January 2019, puts a number into the test for how rare a first name can be. One of the discretionary conditions for approving a forename is that it be “in established use of the same sex” as the person being named. A name that fails those conditions can still be approved on separate grounds, and one of them is a count: that according to the Population Information System, five living persons of the same sex already bear it. Another is a connection to a foreign state whose established naming practice the name follows.
The five-person rule opens a door rather than closing one. The outright grounds for refusal are separate and narrow — a name likely to give offence, likely to cause harm, or manifestly inappropriate as a forename. Nobody may hold more than four forenames. Name questions can reach the name board, which is appointed for five years at a time and gives opinions to the population agency, the courts and other authorities; it will not take a position on an individual name in advance.
๐ Where the Name Service Stops Counting
The Digital and Population Data Services Agency runs a public Name service, and its surname list carries a date: the material was last updated on 21 September 2026. Korhonen leads it on 21,624 — 11,080 men and 10,544 women — ahead of Virtanen on 20,757 and Mäkinen on 19,269. Those are not counts of living Finns. The service covers everyone recorded in the Population Information System, with data running from the 1800s to the present, and the agency states that the numbers include the dead. The list stops at the hundred most common names.
Below the hundred, it goes quiet on purpose. The agency calls what the service gives you rough estimates, and says that if you search for a rare name, “its exact number will not be displayed in the service to ensure the privacy of individuals” — which also, it adds, stops the service giving the wrong impression that a name is established for a particular gender. Rarity has an administrative floor: Finland will publish how many Korhonens its register holds, but not how many of you.
โญ Rare Facts About Finland
Where these numbers come from
Population: Statistics Finland, 5,659,324 at the end of August 2026. Height: the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare measured 177.5 cm for men aged 18 and over in FinTerveys 2017 and 180.8 cm for men aged 18 to 29; the tile above does not say which. Blood groups: the Finnish Red Cross Blood Service publishes the national distribution. Eye and hair colour: we found no Finnish register or official survey that publishes a distribution for either, so treat those two tables as estimates rather than records. Last checked September 2026.