Don't it Make my Brown Eyes Blue?

[steepholm]

I've a feeling I may have posted on this subject before - but maybe that was just in my head, where the Voices keep up a lively debate on all the trivia of the day...

When I was small, I knew that I had brown eyes. Certainly that's what was said in my family. My mother and I were left-handed and brown-eyed, my father and brother were right-handed and blue-eyed. That kind of symmetry appealed at the time. All the same, I assume I occasionally thought to carry out an empirical cross-check and look in the mirror, and nothing I saw there made me question the received opinion. I think it wasn't until I was at college that someone who had taken to staring into my eyes a lot happened to mention that they were actually hazel-green. Looking more closely, I saw that they were indeed - although there was also some dark brown there still, and even a fleck or two of blue, and yellow, and slate-grey.

Ever since then, I've not known what colour my eyes are. If I had to fill in a tick-box form describing them, I simply would not know what to say.

As an experiment, I just took three pictures of my left eye, about a minute apart: under artificial light, in bright sunlight, and indoors in natural light.






How would you describe this eye, in terms of colour? (Its fellow is similar.) I thought of doing this as a poll, but I don't want to make this into a leading question.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Grey.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

It's hard to tell because internet pictures, but from the middle one especially, I expect they're a bit ilke mine. My driving license lists them as 'green', which they mostly are, and that's usually what I tell people, but they're technically a kind of chameleon hazel: green, with a gold ring around the iris (I see that!) but with a habit of changing visible colour depending on the season, the light, and what colour I'm wearing. Maybe we should call them Mary Sue eyes?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That all sounds familiar! I wonder if it's a red-headed thing? Not that I'm red-headed myself - mostly - but my father was.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Clearly it is an Awesome Left-Handed Genius thing. ;)

[fjm.livejournal.com]

My mother and her mother had brown eyes. Her father had blue-grey. My Dad's are brown. Mine are green or green grey (I tend to describe them as duck pond green). I share this one with just one cousin. And the colour changes depending on what I wear (green turns them greyer, purple highlights the green, as does red).

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

Sort Of Hazelly, AKA Messes With Iridologists. (Mine are Sort Of Bluey.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Iridologists - new word to me, and a new idea too.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

Truly of tosh there is no end!

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

They look like they're probably the same colour as mine - green with a gold ring at the centre, more hazel in some light than others. Or maybe yours are hazel - it's hard to be sure, based on these pics.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Tawny-grey.

[sheenaghpugh]

Hazel. Could it be this? (Doesn't sound like a problem, if so.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's that. I don't seem to have a pale ring around my iris.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

In the middle photo you appear to have the same colour eyes as my husband while the bottom photo shows them as very similar to my eyes.

I'm sure I started life with blue eyes, like my parents, but at some point during or shortly after junior school, they turned greeney-hazel. I seem to recall that hazel is a recessive gene, which is how the colour can crop up in the child of blue-eyed parents.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Your photos look pretty similar to mine, I'd say.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

1. Brown.

2. Hazel.

3. Blue-gray? That one's hard to describe.

[joxn.livejournal.com]

"Hazel" was my first response, and going by Wikipedia that seems about right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_color#Hazel

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link, and you're probably right. (I see that 'definitions of the color hazel vary', which is handy.)

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

My eyes are the same. Blue in some lights and waring some colours, green in others, but basically hazel. I claim blue or green (and sometimes grey, when I feel they're looking that way) when I feel like it (for they are both) but really, my eyes are mixed colours, which is what hazel mostly is.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm learning only now that hazel is a kind of miscellaneous pick and mix.