Why is the human eye colour generally Brown, Blue and other similar variations. Why no bright green, purple, black or orange?
In: Biology
In short the same reason why *human skin isn’t anything else but light to dark brown and also the same reason why *human hair is naturally certain shades of one another like brown, blonde, black, red, etc. It’s because of a natural pigment group of amino acids called melanin that is the pigment in most living organisms. When is comes over to eye color, blue means no melanin in the eye, and when light particles get absorbed they gets scattered back into the atmosphere. Eyes with a little bit of melanin are green to hazel and eyes with a lot of melanin are brown to dark brown.
Edit: thanks for the silver kind stranger!
Eyecolor is determained by the amount of melanin in the iris. Melanin is a darkish pigment that helps protext the skin and eyes by blocking damaging UV rays.
The color comes from how light is refracted in your eyeball with the melanin. Blue eyes have the least amount, leading to the color blue being reflected mostly, in a processes similar to how the sky is blue.
More melaanin causes more brown tones, leading to green with a little more, and greys and growns with other amounts.
The way light reflects with this pigment doesn’t allow for purple or other colors to show.
Didn’t Elizabeth Taylor have purple eyes?
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My wife tells me that my eyes switch between being green and blue, which I always thought was interesting. Why would that happen?
Actually ELY5: Color is what you see when light reflects off a surface. The melanin in your eye is the ‘surface’ light bounces from when you see eye color. Human eye melanin can’t reflect colors like bright green, black, or orange; only colors like brown, blue, grey, and the green we see.
Thanks for the replys everyone. Would people care to share any photos of their eyes? Close ups obviously to preserve anonymity etc even if your eyes aren’t an off colour I’d just be interested to see the differences.
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