Twin girls are getting a lot of attention for their appearances, and it’s not just because they’re unbelievably cute.
Kalani received her mother’s light skin and blue eyes, while Jarani received her father’s darker skin and brown eyes.
Kalani and Jarani Dean are biracial twins who were born to a Caucasian mother and an African-American father ― and each girl has a different skin tone.
“Their dad couldn’t believe it,” proud mom Whitney Meyer told The Huffington Post Thursday of her boyfriend, Tomas Dean.
The girls, who were born in April, are now 9 months old, but recently made headlines after Meyer shared their photo with the local news station in Quincy, Illinois.
Exactly how this amazing combination happened goes back to their genetic makeup.
The twins are dizygotic or fraternal, meaning they developed from two different eggs and sperm cells. That separation allowed them to inherit their own individual combinations of genes from Mom and Dad.
“It was right away I noticed a difference,” Meyer said of the babies’ skin tone.
“I did ask the nurses if she was albino because she was so white, and lighter than her sister,” she told Inside Edition.
Researchers in Britain have reported that there’s a one in 500 chance that such a combination can occur among fraternal twins born from parents of different races.
Because there are now more interracial couples in the world, Dr. Nancy L. Segal, psychology professor and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, suggested to PEOPLE that this phenomena may become more prevalent.
For Meyer and her family, the twins’ skin color is just a cosmetic detail.
“I don’t know [what] their future holds, being opposite, but everyone else loves them. You can’t just love one and not the other,” she said.
That includes her 7-year-old son, Talan, who is Caucasian and has a different father.
Talan, she said, recognizes that his sisters are different from one another in skin tone. He has consequently pointed out that Jarani’s skin matches the darker tone of his late younger brother, Pravyn, who tragically died at the age of 2, as Meyers told PEOPLE.
“He loves the fact his sisters look like both their brothers,” Meyer told HuffPost of her son.
These gorgeous gals drop jaws everywhere they go (and not just because they’re so adorable).
You may assume Kalani and Jarani Dean are just close friends, but the baby girls are actually twins. The dynamic duo portray their parents in the most unbelievable way: Kalani inherits fair skin from her mother, who is white, and Jarani has brown skin like her dad, who is black. Despite their stark physical differences, they share the same DNA.
The lucky parents are Whitney Meyer and Tomas Dean, from Quincy, Illinois. Meyer has been posting pictures of the unique pair since they were born last April, and their images have been going viral ever since.
The genetic phenomenon is exceedingly rare, but, of course, entirely possible. According to geneticist Jim Wilson to the BBC, there is about a one in 500 chance for mixed-race couples in Britain expecting twins that their babies will come out with different skin colors.
Essentially, Kalani and Jarani are dizygotic, the scientific term for fraternal twins. While monozygotic (identical) twins start off from the same egg and then divide later, fraternal twins start out as a separate fertilized egg.
In this situation, each embryo receives a different medley of genes from mom and dad. Because there are so many genes that control skin tone and eye color, even scientists can’t grasp all the potential ways they can interact. When the parents are of different races, the inherited genes for skin color can be distributed differently.
Meyer recently told TODAY that she considers the girls a symbol against racism and a sign to love everyone equally. “You can’t look at one and not love them both,” she said.“They’re the same girl, just different colors.”
Dean agrees: “I was like, ‘Yeah, she’s a little light,’ but I thought maybe babies are that way when they’re first born. But then a couple of minutes later, her sister came out a little darker,” he said. “In a million years, I never thought I’d have a girl with blue eyes. I didn’t think I could pull that one off!”
The girls just celebrated their 1st birthday this past April.
