Look around.

The next time you're in a group of people.

How many of them have blue eyes?

How many have brown or hazel?

Anyone with green eyes?

Why do people have different colored eyes?

The colored part of our eye is called the iris.

It's actually a band of muscle around the pupil.

The black part of your eye.

The pupil, is the part that lets the light in.

And the iris controls how much light gets in by dilating or contracting your pupil.

The color of your iris comes from melanin, a pigment in our bodies that gives us different skin and hair shades as well.

Generally speaking, the more melanin in your iris, the darker your eye color.

Lots of melanin will give someone brown eyes.

Green or hazel eyes means less melanin.

People with blue or gray have little to no melanin in their eyes.

Other pigments also influence eye color, so eyes can be a wide variety of shades of gray, blue, green, hazel, amber, or brown.

Eye color is genetic but multiple genes control it, so you might have a different shade or even a totally different color than one or both of your biological parents.

And your eye color can actually change as you age.

In fact, many babies are born with blue eyes that later turn darker.

Occasionally, one person has two eyes that are different colors from each other.

That's a condition called heterochromia.

It's very rare.

People can even have two different colors in the same eye.

That's pretty cool.

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