It’s beautiful! This trait is called central heterochromia and is very rare. When you meet someone with two different eye colors in the same eye, you can’t help but stare. It’s all just different levels of the brown pigment called melanin. There is actually no such thing as blue, green, or hazel pigments in the eye. If even more melanin is present (like in African Americans, Hispanic or Asian populations), their eyes lean more towards a dark brown color.īabies born with blue eyes can develop more melanin in their bodies as they grow, resulting in changing eye color as older children. Those that have a fair amount of melanin tend to have hazel eyes. Melanin is the pigment that gives us our eye color and also affects our skin color. Up to 16 genes can play a part in our eye color, and it all depends on how those genes interact with each other. Although this is true, it doesn’t necessarily mean we will have their same eye color. Science used to say that our eye color was simply something we inherit from our parents. It may be hard to describe the actual color of hazel eyes because it seems like they are constantly changing depending on your setting. Others might say your eyes have an amber hue to them. Causes of Hazel EyesĪre your eyes hazel? How do you describe them? Some say they are brownish-green or a little gold. central heterochromia, a term you may have never heard of. Let’s take a look at the differences between hazel eyes vs. So contrary to popular belief, green eyes are not a genetic mutation, but rather a variation that occurred when a population migrated from one region to another years and years ago.Įye color is a mysterious phenomenon that scientists still haven’t completely figured out yet, but we do know that eye color can reveal a lot about a person’s genetic code, and where their ancestors may have come from.Have you ever met someone with two different eye colors in the same eye? Have you always considered them as having hazel eyes? That could be the case, but it could be something more. People with green eyes are found in virtually every area around the world, which indicates that green eyes mainly occur in people that have some sort of migration of ancestors in their lineage. If you have green eyes, than you should know that your eye color is the least common eye color in existence, and only 2% of the population has green eyes. However, we do know that people with hazel eyes are more likely to have eyes that appear as different colors depending on the time of day and even what they are wearing! How does this occur? People with hazel eyes can have a mixed ancestral lineage from Europe and Asia, which makes it difficult to trace just where this unique eye color came from. Hazel eyes are the most difficult eye color to read because hazel is defined as the midway color between blue and brown, so many people with hazel eyes have multiple colors within one of their irises. It is commonly believed that blue eyes originally occurred because of a genetic mutation of one single ancestor that occurred 6-10 thousand years ago! This indicates that at one point in time, your eye color was brand-new to the world! Only about 8% of the world’s population has blue eyes, and it is said that blue eyes trace back to Northern Europe. Because of the dark pigmentation of brown eyes, people with this eye color are less likely to be subject to sun damage. Your eyes can say a lot about your ancestral lineage because of the complex genetic coding that is involved with eye color, and here is a closer look into what your eye color means…īrown eyes are the most common eye color among our current population (about 55% of people have them), but having brown eyes comes with many benefits! If you have brown eyes, your eyes have more melanin in them, which means that they are less sensitive to the harmful UV rays that the sun gives off. Ten years ago, this ‘fact’ was disproved and the new fact stands that eye color can be determined by up to 16 different genes! What does this mean exactly? Eye color is not as cut and dry as we once believed, but an offspring can inherit virtually any eye color no matter how rare. Until The American Journal of Human Genetics determined otherwise in a 2007 study, it was commonly believed that eye color was a simple trait that was passed on by one gene from each parent.
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