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Eye Color Distribution – What Your Eye Color Says About You

Posted on February 22, 2021

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but did you know that the beauty within your eye can actually say a lot about you? If you made it through that convoluted sentence then you’re probably wondering exactly what that means. It turns out that your eye color is useful for more than just identifying you on your driver’s license, it can actually indicate a lot about your genetics!

Brown Eyes

man with beautiful brown eye color

Do you have brown eyes? Well, consider yourself lucky – or maybe unlucky – because you have the most common eye color in the world! Being one of the popular kids isn’t the only benefit of brown eyes, some studies have actually suggested that men with brown eyes seem more trustworthy than their blue eyed counterparts.

So why would anyone want any other eye color than brown? It seems like there are some people out there that do since an experimental new procedure promises to transform brown eyes to blue ones with the help of a powerful laser. This surgery hasn’t been approved for use in the US yet, but it is getting a lot of traction on the Internet. Regardless of what color your eyes are, you should love them for what they are because they all hold their own unique traits!

Blue Eyes

Macro shot of blue woman's eye after lasic surgery

Do you think you have a big family? If you have blue eyes – that family just got a whole lot bigger. Research indicates that all blue-eyed people might actually share a common ancestor.

While you may think that the phrase ‘baby blue’ is only used to refer to a popular sweatsuit color from the early 2000s, it actually has its roots in the science of human development. At an early point in every baby’s development, they actually have blue eyes! This is usually due to melanin, the pigment that gives darker coloring to eyes, skin, and hair, not having entered the iris yet. The less melanin an eye contains, the lighter it appears which means that an eye with very little or no melanin will actually look blue.

Green Eyes

Green Eye

Unlike blue eyes, green eyes are not present from birth. Babies born with blue or grey eyes sometimes develop green eyes over time. Despite being one of the rarest eye colors, green eyes have been around for thousands of years and can actually be traced as far back as Siberia in the Bronze Age.

Green eyes are never actually green either – the appearance of green eyes is actually caused by low levels of dark black melanin and a large amount of yellow melanin.

Hazel Eyes

photo of closeup of stunning womans eye

Hazel eyes are definitely one of the trickier eye colors to pin down. What color is hazel exactly? Hazel eyes are usually a combination of brown, green, and gold, although they can appear to look like any of those colors at a distance. Hazel often means that the inside of an individual’s iris is a different color than the outer rim, giving their eyes a bright, vibrant, multicolored appearance. The causes behind this color distribution is due to a combination of melanin distribution in the iris’ outer rim and an effect known as Rayleigh scattering – the same phenomenon responsible for our sky appearing blue. While they’re more common than green eyes, hazel is still a fairly rare eye color.

Red Eyes

Although you may have spotted yourself with red eyes in your tagged photos on Facebook a few times, that’s actually only due to a photographic phenomenon known as the Red Eye Effect. In low lighting, flash photograph can make light bounce off of the blood vessels at the back of your retina which causes red light to be collected by a camera.

Actual red eyes only appear in people with certain forms of albinism. Due to low amounts of melanin, the blood vessels in the eye become more apparent and give off a red appearance.

Eyes are fascinating! Treat your eyes right and book a LASIK consultation today.

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