Tag melanin

There’s No Such Thing As Blue Eyes

drstaceynaito Leave a comment
Portrait of a beautiful little girl with blue eyes. Close-up.

© pixander, 123RF Free Images

Please check out this interesting article which was posted on the American Academy of Ophthalmology website, explaining the science behind eye color. I have copied and pasted it here so that you can easily read it.

By Dan T. Gudgel

Reviewed By Ivan R Schwab, MD, FACS

Jun. 16, 2023

Brown and hazel eyes get their color from melanin, the same pigment that colors your skin. The more melanin in the eye, the darker your eye color will appear. 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.

How do eyes get their color?

Eye color depends on the iris, the colored part of the eye. 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, hazel, blue or green. 

  • 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.

Is there a way to predict a baby’s eye color?

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.

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.

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.

Why do some eyes change colors in different lighting?

People with hazel or green eyes might notice that their eye color changes depending on surrounding light. Green and hazel eyes are a mixture of pigment color and color from scattered light, so they can look different in different lighting conditions.

Since blue eyes get their color from the light that’s coming in and being reflected back out, they also can appear as different colors depending on the lighting conditions. 

What is the rarest eye color?

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:

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

Freckles

drstaceynaito Leave a comment

freckles_face_makeup_lipstick_hd-wallpaper-78799

Ephelides, more commonly known as freckles, are clumps of melanine containing cells which are more commonly seen on individuals with fair skin. The stereotypical freckle-faced person is red-headed, with fair skin and blue or green eyes. Freckles can be cute, and sometimes they can even look sexy.

Some people celebrate freckles so much that they make sure to keep them visible, while others are annoyed by them and want to get rid of them. My mother held the opinion that freckles were ugly, and went so far as to refer to my freckles as “fly shit”. You can imagine how hearing such terminology made me feel as a child, especially when my classmates were told that their freckles were “angel’s kisses”. Why were my freckles compared to insect excrement? Thankfully, I got over my horror of having fly doo-doo on my face, and I make no effort to hid them, though they have faded over the years as a result of my avoidance of the sun.

Though I don’t fight what nature gave me, I know many people who can’t stand their freckles, and who undergo chemical peels and light-based treatments to rid themselves of the stubborn brown speckling. So when I heard that there was a recent trend in which women were creating freckles with makeup, I was pretty astonished.

Check out this YouTube video from Mykie of Glam & Gore, in which she demonstrates how to create a freckled look:

As a physician who has worked in cosmetic dermatology, I have been keenly interested in any technology or topical agent which can deliver the spot-lightening results which people around the world seek. So I just cannot understand why anyone would be interested in such a bizarre makeup trend.