What Does It Mean When You Have Blue Eyes

Your Blue Eyes Aren't Really Blue

How do eyes get their color?

Brown eyes get their color from melanin, the same pigment that colors your skin. But blue eyes don't have any blue pigment in them. Blue eyes get their color the same way water and the sky get their blue color. They scatter light so that more blue light reflects back out.

Hint: Eye color depends on the iris

The colored part of the eye is called the iris. It's a structure that contains muscle and other kinds of cells. You can see the iris in action when it squeezes or relaxes to let in more or less light through the pupil. The iris is made up of two layers. For almost everyone — even people with blue eyes — the back layer (called the pigment epithelium) has brown pigment in it.

The front layer of the iris (called the stroma) can make eyes appear brown, blue or green

• For people with brown eyes, some of the cells also have brown pigment in them.

• People with blue eyes have no pigment at all in this front layer, causing the fibers to scatter and absorb some of the longer wavelengths of light that come in. More blue light gets back out and the eyes appear to be blue.
• For people with green or hazel eyes, one or both of the layers of the iris contains light brown pigment. The light brown pigment interacts with the blue light and the eye can look green or speckled.
• Many people have variations in the color of their irises, often with one color near the pupil and another at the edge. This variation happens when different parts of the iris have different amounts of pigment in them.

It's hard to predict a child's eye color by looking at the parents

The genetics of eye color are very complicated. You can't predict a child's eye color just from looking at the parents' eyes. Even parents who have the same color eyes as each other could have a child with different colored irises.

Genetic research has shown that blue eyes probably only appeared in the last 6,000 to 10,000 years. Before then, everyone had brown eyes. Blue eyes have probably spread through the population just because some people like how they look and chose to have children with blue-eyed people.

Some eyes change color in different lighting — here's why

Since blue eyes get their color from the light that's coming in and being reflected back out, they really can appear as different colors depending on the lighting conditions. Green and hazel eyes are a mixture of pigment color and color from scattered light, so they can also look different in different lighting conditions.

Babies often do not have much pigment in their irises when they are born. This is why their eyes can look very blue. More pigment accumulates in the iris over the first few months of a child's life and blue eyes can become less blue or even turn completely brown. For most children, eye color stops changing after the first year, but for some kids the color can continue to change for several more years.

Can you guess the rarest eye color in the United States?

The Academy surveyed more than 2,000 Americans to determine what color eyes they have. Below are the results of that 2014 Harris Poll survey, weighted to reflect the United States population at that time.

Of the 2014 U.S. population:

• 45% have brown eyes
• 27% have blue eyes
• 18% have hazel eyes
• 9% have green eyes
• 1% have eyes a color not listed above

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Source: https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/your-blue-eyes-arent-really-blue

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