Hazel color skin#

Hazel color skin#

The pigment responsible for eye colour is called melanin, which also affects skin colour. The pigmented structure inside the eye that surrounds the pupil and gives eyes their colour is called the iris. This phenomenon has little to do with genetics, but it does help explain where hazel eyes come from. Many white, non-Hispanic babies are born with blue eyes and then develop brown, green or hazel eyes in childhood. For example, we now know it's possible for two blue-eyed parents to have a child with brownĮyes - something the old model of eye colour inheritance would have deemed impossible.Īlso, eye colour can change dramatically in the first few years of life. Recent research has shown that up to 16 genes (not just one or two) may influence eye colour, which makes predicting eye colour much more difficult.ĭue to variations in the interaction and expression of multiple genes, it's hard to say for sure what colour a child's eyes will be based on the colour of his or her parents' eyes. So two parents with blue eyes cannot have a child with brown eyes because neither parent carries the dominant form of the gene for brown eyes.īut it turns out the story is more complicated than that. Most of us were taught in high school science class that we inherit our eye colour from our parents, and that brown eye colour is dominant and blue is recessive. So where does this stunning colour come from? What determines eye colour? One of the reasons it's so hard to describe hazel-coloured eyes is that the hue itself seems to change, depending on what you wear and the type of lighting you are in.Īlso, although hazel eyes appear to contain hues of green, amber and even blue, these colour pigments don't exist in the human eye. Some say it looks like hazelnut, while others call it golden or brownish green. For starters, people describe this beautiful eye colour in many different ways.