

If you’re dissatisfied with your eye color for whatever reason, there are always colored contacts. The red you see in pictures is a reflection of the flash off of the back of the eye, which is filled with blood vessels. These red eyes are different from the red eyes you sometimes see in photographs when a flash is used. Because there is so little melanin in the eyes, there is nothing to conceal the blood vessels hard at work. What you’re actually seeing in these rabbits and in albinos is the blood vessels behind the iris. “Yes, red,” I say, although we often call them pink. Individuals whose eyes appear to be one color closest to the pupil, another color a little farther our, and another color around the edge of the iris are likely to have hazel eyes. Much like gray eyes, hazel eyes may appear to “change color” from green to light brown to gold. Hazel eyes mostly consist of shades of brown and green. I have always incorrectly called this color eye hazel! Green is the least common eye color, but it is found most frequently in northern and central Europe. And they may appear to “change color” from gray to blue to green depending on clothing, lighting, and mood (which may change the size of the pupil, compressing the colors of the iris). Gray eyes may be called “blue” at first glance, but they tend to have flecks of gold and brown. Individuals with brown eyes have more melanin present, and over half of the people in the world have brown eyes.

Lesson #381: it’s not funny to suggest your mother-in-law was unfaithful.)īrown is the most common eye color. (Note: I recently asked my blue-eyed in-laws how they produced my amber-eyed spouse, incorrectly telling them it was genetically impossible. Recently, scientists announced that everyone with blue eyes is related! Because of various racial groups intermarrying, blue eyes, which are generally recessive, are becoming rarer and rarer. Often confused with hazel eyes, amber eyes tend to be a solid golden or copper color without flecks of blue or green typical of hazel eyes.īlue eyes have a low level of pigment present in the iris. Irises are classified as being one of six colors: amber, blue, brown, gray, green, hazel, or red. The iris has pigmentation that determines the eye color. The colored part of the eye is called the iris. All blue eyes are not created equal because eye color is determined by many different gene combinations, as seen in the image below: The genetics of eye color is very complicated. Exactly what color are your eyes? Hazel-ish? Blue-gray-green? Blue with brown spots? Green with gray spots? Most of us are taught in high school biology that two blue-eyed parents are guaranteed to have blue-eyed kids, but it’s not that straightforward. But what if they want to change the color of their eyes? People have long been fascinated with eye color after all, eyes come in a wide range of shades. Following suit is the theory that two people with blue eyes will automatically have a child with blue eyes due to the gene being recessive, rather than dominant.When someone wants to enhance their vision, they may try contact lenses or seek out LASIK eye surgery. It’s long been believed that if someone has brown eyes – or what appear to be brown eyes – their chances of having a child with lighter eyes are slim. “It’s believed that’s how blue eyes came about, but it may just be the de-emphasis on the need for all the melanin,” Heiting said. In one study, he analyzed genes for eye color and identified what he believed to be a common mutation causing blue eye color. This would lead to light eyes in the affected individual their rarity may have made them more attractive and aided their natural selection within the population. “There was less need for all that melanin,” Heiting said.Īnother theory conceived by professor Hans Eiberg at the University of Copenhagen was that a mutation once switched off the ability of someone’s eye to produce melanin.
#Light blue eyes skin#
While high levels of melanin – in eyes, hair, and skin – help protect people in hotter climates, like Africa, from UV radiation, the need for the protective pigment decreases as people move to locations with less sun. Regular marijuana use might affect vision, study says Marijuana use became more widespread in the 1960s, reflecting the rising counterculture movement.
