Why do eyes lose their color when scarred?
In: Biology
As far as I know nothing really affects the colored part. The iris.
That cloudiness in the middle of the lens can happen from trauma, just like how your car windshield shatters with a web of cracks. “Cataracts” can also come from chemical burns or infections, and often IS the cause of blindness.
Games and movies and such use a cloudy lens to help the audience know the character is blind.
Your eye is a ball that is imbedded in your skull.
The part you can touch is called your cornea. This is a clear “window”. Right behind your cornea is a “bubble” of clear fluid. You constantly “wash” this fluid through – think of it like a pool of water has a stream on either side, so the water swirls around and gets replaced all the time. The other side of the “bubble” is your iris. This is where the colour of your eye is.
So when you look at someone’s eyes, you look through the window and the pool to the iris to see their eye colour. That is what you are looking at. The little black dot in the middle is a hole called your pupil, and light shines through it to the back of your eye. This is what allows you to see.
When something damages your eye, the cornea – the “window” – gets scarred. This is what turns milky. When the cornea gets scarred, it’s like drawing a curtain over a window. It means you can’t see out, and you can’t see in. A person looking from the outside can’t see the iris – the eye colour – any more than a person looking from the inside can see light.
Eye colour is all about refraction – how light bends when it goes through the clear layer of your cornea and into the fluid-filled cushion that is the lens of your eye. All irises (the coloured part around the pupil) are brown. Different lenses/cornea constructions cause colours other than brown. A blue-eyed person has a brown iris with a lens plus cornea that bends light to make it look blue. Same for green and hazel.
When you injure/scar the lens/cornea, you affect how the light is bent through the lens/cornea, and that can change the colour you perceive.
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