What Dose Your Eye Color Mean?

 

When we're born, virtually all of our eyes started as blue (hence the phrase "baby blues"). This is because the white light entering our eyes gets scattered and absorbed by cells in the eye, reflecting only blue light back through the irises. It's the same reason the sky is blue, actually.

As we get a little older, however, a pigment in our irises called melanin begins to develop. With low levels of melanin, most of the blue light can still reflect back, and a person retains their blue eyes. At higher levels, melanin obscures this blue light, leading to brown, or even black, eyes. Green and hazel eyes are kind of the middle ground between these two extremes. Also, depending on how these patches of melanin form, you can actually have multi-colored eyes: green with brown in the middle, hazel around a ring of gold, that sort of thing.

The amount of melanin you actually wind up with – and thus, the color your eyes will be - is based on the combination of your parents' eye color genes. So, really, if your eye color means anything, it mostly serves as a reminder of where you come from – that you're your parents' offspring, or that you're one rung in a genetic ladder spanning generations. If that's something you'd like to be reminded of, great! If not, might I suggest colored contacts?

In the end, eye color can't mean the same thing to everyone. No two eyes are the same, and neither are the ways we as individuals consider them. Your feelings about each eye color – and what you feel they say about the people who have them – are based on your own personal experience. If your first boyfriend had brown eyes, maybe you still associate them with that time – sweet, innocent, carefree. If you have blue eyes yourself, maybe that's your favorite eye color in others. In the end, though, no one can really tell you what your eye color means but you