![]() The eye color of a grandparent can change the odds a little. Likewise, parents with brown eyes will usually produce a brown-eyed child, but not always. But in simple terms, two blue-eyed parents, for example, are more likely to have a blue-eyed baby. ![]() While melanin is what technically gives the eyes their color, it’s the eye colors of a baby’s parents - and to a certain extent, of your great-great-great uncle and your great grandma and all the others in that big family tree of yours - that help determine the amount of melanin that is secreted. But if you’re looking for clues and if it’s possible, stand with your baby’s other parent and look in the mirror together. And the exact color can’t be predicted by you any easier than it can be by a Magic 8 Ball. There’s no way to know when the final color will be set. That means your blue-eyed newborn may have brown eyes by the time they take their first steps. ![]() Eye color often changes during the first year or even longer. Your baby’s first eye color may be permanent. Predicting final eye color (spoiler: you can’t) Acclaimed African American actor James Earl Jones, for example, has blue eyes, likely the result of having ancestors of European descent with blue eyes.Īnd speaking of ancestors, let’s take a look at what goes into determining what your baby’s final eye color will be. This explains why people with darker skin tend to have darker-colored eyes, too.īut there are always exceptions. More melanin in your system means a darker complexion. Those influential melanocytes are also hard at work in hair and skin, giving them their colors, too. It’s the same dynamic that makes water in an ocean look blue. Most of that scattered light that gets back out is blue light, giving blue eyes their color. As light enters the eye, most of the light is absorbed in the back layer, while particles in the spongy middle layer (stroma) scatter the remaining light reflecting back out of the eye. The iris has three layers, and people with brown eyes have melanin in all three.Ī blue-eyed person has brown pigment in the back layer only. These are the brown eyes that greet so many smiling parents. ![]() A lot more melanin means brown eyes.īut for many babies in the womb - including, specifically, many babies of non-Caucasian descent, though this can be true for any ethnicity - melanocytes don’t need the light of day to pump melanin into those developing irises. If a little more melanin makes its way into the iris, their eyes will look green or hazel. If your child’s melanocytes don’t secrete much more melanin in the months and years ahead, then their eyes will stay blue. (Though remember, ethnicity also comes into play - so some babies will produce more melanin than others. Melanocytes respond to light, and since your newborn has spent the last several months in total darkness, there wasn’t much light to trigger melanin production in the irises. ![]() Blue eyes mean there is little melanin in the iris. What gives an iris its color is a natural pigment called melanin, a protein secreted by special cells called melanocytes. If your baby had jaundice at birth - don’t worry, this isn’t uncommon - the sclera may have been a little yellowish. The white part of the eye is called the sclera. The term “eye color” refers to the color of the iris, the ring around the pupil, which is black. ![]()
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