Our eye colors range from very light blue eyes to darker eyes, like very dark brown.Humans mainly have gray, blue, brown, green, and hazel eyes. In general, the most common eye color is brown, while green irises are the rarest.Purple eyes don’t exist, but one can have them by wearing colored contacts, and one’s eye color gets settled for life when a child is three years old. It doesn’t change after that. Blue eyes are not that special. In fact, including dark and light blue eyes, brown, green, and hazel eyes as well are actually more common than you’d think. A genetic mutation can cause heterochromia. This can cause one’s left eye to be hazel while the right to be green or vice-versa.Read on to know more about eye colors and if you’re interested, then also check out facts about the body system and yellow onion nutrition facts.Causes Of Different Eye ColorsScientists used to believe that the cause of people’s different eye colors depended entirely on one genetic trait. However, since then, it has been discovered that actually many genes are responsible for your eye color.According to old studies done by scientists, if someone had a certain eye color, it was only because of a simple inheritance pattern of the eye colors. For example, if someone had green or blue eyes, it was because both their parents’ eyes were green or blue. If one of their parents had brown eyes and the other had green eyes, the child could not have green eyes because usually brown eyes are dominant over green eyes.Upon further research, it has been found that the reason for people’s different eye colors is a little more complex than that. A child could have two brown eyes even if they had two blue-eyed parents. Mainly the reason lies behind the genes responsible for melanin on the colored part in our eyes. The pigment called melanin absorbs more colors and light, so the eyes of the people who have more melanin in their eyes appear darker to other people, like brown pigment or brown eyes. Blue eyes have the least amount of melanin, so the most amount of light reflects off of the eyes of a blue-eyed person. Albinism is another genetic condition that causes light-colored eyes in people. Heterochromia is a rare genetic condition that causes one person to have two different-colored eyes. For example, one eye can be brown and another hazel. It mostly happens due to a harmless genetic change.There are also some diseases that cause changes in eye color, like cataracts, uveitis, pigment dispersion syndrome, and more.Why do people have different eye colors?The genetics that is responsible for the presence of melanin in a person’s eyes works behind the curtain in this case. Hence, people get different eye colors owing to more or less melanin, increased or decreased pigmentation in their eyes.Presence of more melanin: People with brown eyes have the most melanin in their eyes. The most common eye color in the world is brown. Around 55-79% of people worldwide have brown eyes. Dark brown-eyed people are usually from Asia and Africa, whereas light brown-eyed people are usually from Europe, America, and West Asia. There is no black eye color. The ones that seem black are actually extremely dark brown eyes.Presence of less melanin: All lighter-colored eyes in the world, like hazel, amber, green, gray, and blue eyes contain less melanin. About 8-10% of people have blue eyes worldwide. Estonia and Finland have the most number, around 89% people with blue eyes and the most common eye color of Germany is also blue. The colors of eyes, hazel eyes, and amber eyes mainly, worldwide their percentage is 5% each. About 3% of people have gray eyes, and 2% of people have green eyes worldwide, making green the rarest eye color. Sometimes the melanin can be so little in the amount that the blood vessels of the eyes become visible, and they appear red.Heterochromia: A rare genetic condition called heterochromia causes a person to have two different eye colors. Like, someone can have one blue eye and another green. Less than 1% of people worldwide have this condition. The cause can be an injury to the eyes, hereditary, some medical issue, or some problem during the development of a person’s eyes.When happens when our eyes blend two colors?The colors a human can see depend all upon its perception. When two colors, like blue and yellow, are near each other within a very small distance, our eye perceives it as a combined color of green. This is known as optical color mixing.Optical color mixing is quite similar to admixing of two colors, but there are a few differences. The difference between admixing colors and optical color mixing is that when admixing colors, the resulting color loses saturation. However, owing to the human eye’s perception, for optical color mixing, the colors don’t lose saturation.How many colors can the human eye see?Our eye has three kinds of cone cells, each of which can see around 100 different colors. Hence, counting the combinations, most of us can see millions of color combinations. This number differs for partial and fully color blind people.When low or bright light hits our eyes, it travels back to our retina. The retina then detects this light with the help of the cones and rods in our eyes. The cones and rods are light receptive cells that detect the light and send the signal to the brain. Every color in the light stimulates more than a single cone in our eyes, so for each of them, a unique signal gets created in response. This way, the brain starts recognizing millions of different colors and combinations.When light hits a surface, the surface either absorbs all the colors of the light, some colors of the light, or none of them. The colors that are not absorbed reflect back at us, and we only see those colors. White light is a combination of colors - violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. When white light hits a surface, all these colors reflect back, so we see white color. When all these colors get absorbed by a surface, we see black in the absence of these colors.Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly facts for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for human eye colors: do you know why we have different colored eyes? then why not take a look at are meerkats endangered? What we can do to help them right now, or learn how to identify and analyse these amazing Arctic plants!
Our eye colors range from very light blue eyes to darker eyes, like very dark brown.
