There’s an old saying that was born out of an old misunderstanding of our biology.
Way back in the dark ages, people could piece two things together that contradicted one another: blood is red, but the veins that carry it in our bodies are blue.
Hence, they came up with the term “Blue Blooded” to refer to extraordinary and privileged people to keep their blood blue inside their bodies and not be harmed.
We now know that’s not precisely how blood works because our skin doesn’t turn blue when we blush.
Except, for a sporadic group of people with a low medical condition, they do. The Fugate family, also known as the “Blue Fugates,” of Kentucky have naturally occurring blue skin. Not pink or pale or tan, it’s blue like the Smurfs.
10 /10 Red, White, And Blue
The Blue Fugates started with the father, Martin Fugate. Martin was originally a French orphan who found a way to settle in the eastern part of Kentucky, along the mountains and settled down for good near the town of Hazard along Troublesome Creek.
He then met Elizabeth Smith and started a family together around 1820. They had seven children, and four of them had noticeably blue skin.
9 /10 Baby Blues
When someone turns blue, it’s usually a sign of asphyxiation or suffocation that they can’t breathe. This was not the case for the Fugate children.
If anything, their strange skin tone distracted from the other symptoms they grew up with and learned to tolerate. Back then, there was no such treatment.
No one even heard of the disease they had – methemoglobinemia – which primarily seemed to alter the pigment of their skin to match the increased blue hue of their blood.