Our eyes can change colour throughout our lives | Hacker News Reader

Our eyes can change colour throughout our lives

bbc.com

42 pointst2345 comments

Here in Sweden it's quite common for newborns to start out as blond and blue eyed only for it to change later. Hair color can take up to four years to darken. Eye color is usually stable within one year, perhaps two.

It is so common that the Swedish phrase for "naive" is "blue eyed".

Happened to me, was blonde when I was a kid, now dark brown. My eyes shifted a little but not too much, from blue to blue-gray.

Same in England, granted there's probably shared genetics in there somewhere. I was bleached blond and had bright blue eyes. Both are now about as dark a brown as you could get.

In Germany there's a common folk wisdom that "all babies are born blue-eyed". Of course, as the article points out, the exception is when they're born brown-eyed.

It's common for most European people I think.

In France, "têtes blondes" (meaning "blonde heads") means children in general, because most children are born with blonde hair, even though they turn dark later on for most of them. Although this is about hair, eye colour is very much correlated with this.

I'm pretty sure that's only the case for people of European descent though, bar probably a few exceptions.

Children of African descent do sometimes, perhaps often, have blue eyes when very young. A remember a co-worker teased about her child's "contacts". (Let me be clear: teased by other women of color.)

In the US (south?) they're called towheads.

Eastern European here. I was blonde as a toddler and over time my hair turned brown. Eyes on the other hand were deep dark brown in childhood but washed out to a much lighter shade of brown after adolescence.

Not Swedish, but blue-eyed, like my father and maternal grandfather, and I was blonde (like my father, and maternal grandfather) until early puberty, when my hair turned brown and wavy. My mother's hair was jet black.

So it can be more than four years, in my case it started when I was eleven years old.

My parents preserved some of my baby hair in a matchbox. Apparently I was blond like a Lannister at the beginning, even blonder maybe. I still have the blue eyes but I will be considered blond only in the Middle East. Most of the darkening happened before I start school but definitely continued until adulthood.

Eyes are so strange. Ever looked at your own iris through a magnifying glass? Mine are strands of grey, yellow and grey-blue... in different lights and settings they can appear more grey, more green, or more blue. They're hard to pin down as a colour and as I've aged they seem darker and sometimes the colours stand out more. I've also found different emotional states seem to make the colours different, I'm assuming this is to do with pupil size and how the iris is relaxed/tense/etc. In my life I've often had "your eyes are blue today", "they're more green today", and of course I don't see my eyes and really have to imagine how they look in that moment, in the light, the environment, with certain clothes, certain emotional states.

Mine are like marbles, blue green, but as I’ve aged have darkened into more of a stony grey. Needless to say my (hazel-eyed) partner gets hours of fun out of them and I too admire her various shades of light brown and amber.

I think I probably had blue eyes when born, I do have a painting my mother made and I had blue eyes. Sometime in my teens / 20s my eyes were some sort of multi color so I was always getting asked what color they were and I was replying brown, gray, hazel, green relatively randomly and getting accepted as yes, that's what they are.

In a party in SF in my 30s a girl started talking to me and saying I had eye surgery done to have my eyes the color they were and being upset with me when I said no, I looked in the mirror they were an incredibly striking blue (I had not taken anything that would alter my perceptions)

My eyes have been pretty much blue since then, although they often seem to vary in lightness dependent on how tired I am or similar factors.

And effect of black UV lights maybe

> Such relatively common, healthy colour change is mostly confined to early childhood. In another study in the US, which tracked more than 1,300 twins from infancy to adulthood, eye colour usually stopped changing by the age of six, though in some cases (10-20% of those studied), it continued to change throughout adolescence and into adulthood.

This is reassuring. I remember my eye color not stabilizing until well into school age but when I recount this as an adult most people refuse to believe me, insisting that it can't change after the first year of age.

I was born blue eyed, then changed to blue-grey, grey-green and eventually mostly pure green.

No worries, I believe you. I was blue-eyed until I changed to blue-green around 6 and have had 100%(-ish) green irises since about 7 or 8.

I've had people not believe me either, which is a little bizarre. Why would I make something like that up?

My kids are 9 and 12 and I'm watching their blue eyes slowly change color. They both have a yellow-ish ring in the very center that's slowly expanding out. It makes for a very striking set of eye colors. I was always told that your eye color is stable after the first few years of life, but that's obviously not correct.

Happens in other mammals also. In kitten is very common to start as light eyes and darken or get more saturated in the first year.

Blue eyes in adult cats came also with some genetic diseases included in the same pack. Angora cats with white fur and light blue eyes are often deaf. They were very popular in the past, but is seen now as an non desirable trait and excluded from breeding programs.

This matches my children's experience. I have blue eyes and my wife is Taiwanese. When our kids were newborn, their eyes were green. In some early photos, almost blue. They also had very light colored hair. By the time they were toddlers their eyes turned the brown color they are now, and their hair became dark brown.

My mother, mid 80's, had red-almond brown eyes most her life. After going through chemo treatment 4 years ago, her eyes became deep blue.

Likewise, my wife had green/grey/hazel eyes when we married, and now they are solid grey.

I thought it was generally known that a lot of babies are born with blue eyes which later change colour.

Personally I had really dark brown eyes until the age of about 12. Then they went very green, and now they are hazel.

> I thought it was generally known that a lot of babies are born with blue eyes which later change colour.

This is mentioned in the article. They said that many people say this, but they could find no research data to back up the claims.

My eyes used to change color frequently when I was a kid between green, yellow, and blue. Even nowadays they range between green and yellow depending on the day.

Al my three kids are born with blond and blue eyes. After a year or 2 they all turned either green or brown eyes. My eyes are blue, my girls brown.

My eye colour has remained the same since birth (light blue). My hair colour has darkened though.

Some carnivores seem to have changing eye color after switching off the standard American diet. Dunno if it's the same for vegans or other diets. I used to have grey/blue eyes and they're green now

Is it possible that the eye colour relates to health, eg toxicity? That there is a physical cause to eye colour changes, and that you eye colour provides an indication of what your body is dealing with?

If they turn yellow that's a pretty good indicator that you have a problem. Other than that, probably not?

This is with respect to the corneas, I interpreted the question as about the iris (this is usually what "eye color" means ofc).

It's not great when corneas turn pink either.

Yes, appearance of a brown thin band in the perimeter of gray, green or blue pupils in adults is a known symptom of nerve disease.

Otherwise is genetic and fixed but some colors are more variable than other in different light levels. Green/grey seem to change a lot.

Yes especially when you lose pigment (iris getting lighter). For details see:

https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/why-are-my-ey...

But could it be that the change in eye colour in children, ie blue to green/brown (and even hair colour), is itself an indication of poor health in some way, albeit that we assume it to be normal..?

My sister had blue eyes when young and they're more green now. My own eyes are a lighter brown than they were in childhood, with hazel rings on the edges of the irises.

My eyes have been shifting from brown to green for some time now. They started identical do my sisters dark brown by look completely different in our late 20'.

The modified title makes it seem like a new discovery.

I used to have blue eyes but now they're just a horrible ugly green. Still unhappy about that.

Ship of Theseus coming to port with different livery every time...

TLDR only if you start with blue color

Quote: a charming, surprised-looking face with wide, slate-grey eyes – similar in shape to his father's brown eyes, but closer in colour to his mother's green. By his second birthday, however, the pictures revealed he had become a happy toddler with eyes the same dark brown shade as his father's, with all trace of the dark grey of those early photographs gone.

The article talks about a study where those with blue eyes changed, but it does not definitely say only blue eyes change color.

I remember a few articles about eye color and it basically said that blue is the starting point and it goes from there. Which is why I read that medical operations to get blue eyes are/would be the easiest as you basically only fix what has changed instead of generating new colors. (but I am no expert by any means so take it with a grain of salt)

Only in the sense of having no pigment. If one were to speak in terms of genetic history I'd expect the opposite: brown would come first, and blue would be one of the most recent mutations.

maybe next time don't quote something author made up and quote actual study:

> One study led by Cassie Ludwig, an ophthalmologist at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University, tracked 148 babies born at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in California, recording their iris colour at birth. Nearly two-thirds of babies were born with brown eyes, and one-fifth with blue.

> Two years later, Ludwig and her colleagues found that of the 40 blue-eyed babies in the study, 11 had brown eyes by the age of two, three had hazel, and two had green. Of the 77 brown-eyed newborns, almost all (73) still had brown eyes at the age of two.

Most of the children (2/3) in study were born with brown color, pretty much none of these 2/3 changed the color. There was rare group (1/5) born with blue eyes where 40% (2/5) changed color.

So TLDR only when you start with blue color*

*for nitpickers - there is extremely small chance you will change color, if you start with color other than brown or blue

Of course it depends on country, in many European countries blue/grey is very common and brown definitely doesn't amke 2/3 of newborns. But it's truth same as with hair you don't go from dark to light, it's possible only the other way. I was born with completely blonde hair, now I have light brown and from what I see other kids blonde baby is pretty much standard, but seeing blonde adults it's relatively rare.

>maybe next time don't quote something author made up and quote actual study

thanks for pointing out the author was untrustworthy, I didn't know that!

>*for nitpickers - there is extremely small chance you will change color, if you start with color other than brown or blue

it seems a little bit much to nag about reading actual study but then noting a 'for nitpickers' that contradicts your TLDR. I mean nitpickers is generally where the science is found at.

>But it's truth same as with hair you don't go from dark to light, it's possible only the other way.

maybe nitpicking, but most people go from dark to light eventually, unless they just go to bald.

two last points, as I noted in other post I went from blue to brown/hazel to blue and that my eye color now varies between various lightness of blue and I don't think the study you refer is that overwhelming that one can say only for blue eyed given it seems to be for a very limited age range in a study that is not very large and probably not especially diverse.

No, the article just starts with citing research done on babies with blue eyes. But it elaborates on that later on. For example:

> Though the data is limited and has only been carried out in just one country, the US, changes in eye colour appears to be most common among people with Northern European, Pacific Islander or mixed-race heritage.

Which checks out for me personally: I'm mixed Dutch-Chinese, my Dutch father has blue eyes and my Chinese mother has dark brown eyes. My sisters and I were born with eyes so dark they looked black, almost as if we had no iris. They lightened to dark brown as we grew up.

yeah, right, only with blue eyes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com