Blue eyes are certainly special and rare as a small percentage of the population possesses this very beautiful color, but new research reveals that blue eyes are not actually that color.
According to experts the blue color we see in someone’s eyes is actually a trick of nature. Blue eye color is determined by melanin, and melanin is actually brown,” wrote Gary Heiting, OD, and Adam Debrowski in All About Vision.
“Our eye color depends on how much melanin is in the iris. Brown eyes have the highest amount of melanin in the iris, while blue eyes have the least,” they reveal.
So blue eyes aren’t actually blue it just means you have much less melanin in your iris compared to your brown eyed friends.
According to the authors of All About Vision, there is no blue pigment in the eye—brown melanin is the only pigment present.
“Eyes appear to be this color only because of the way light hits the layers of the iris and is reflected back to the viewer,” they wrote.
And while genes play an important role in determining your eye color—explaining why you might have blue eyes like your mom or brown eyes like your dad—they’re not the only factor that determines it.
“Geneticists now know that as many as 16 different genes influence eye color to some extent—no relation to the one or two genes once thought to determine iris hue,” Heiting and Debrowski wrote.
“In addition to genetics, the anatomical structure of the iris can also influence eye color to some extent.”
This means that children do not necessarily have the same eye color as their parents. A baby’s iris does not contain much melanin when it is born – so it may initially appear to have blue eyes. But as they get older, more melanin will develop and their eye color may change.
“The range of time a baby will develop its ‘true’ eye color varies, but it usually occurs between six and nine months,” said Dean McGee Eye Institute’s Emily M. Zepeda, MD, clinical assistant professor and pediatric ophthalmologist in the department of ophthalmology at the Dean McGee Eye Institute/University of Oklahoma.
*With information from uniladtech
