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Most commonly, you see brown, blue, or hazel eyes when you look at the
people around you, but some people, whether it be luck or a medical condition,
wind up with a really cool and rare eye color. What are the rarest eye colors
and how do they happen?
1. Black Eyes
Have you ever seen someone with eyes that seem black as night? Although
they appear black, they are really just a very, very dark brown, which is caused
by an abundance of melanin. You may only be able to determine the pupil from
the iris when looking at the eye with a bright light!
2. Red/Pink Eyes
Two major conditions cause a red or pinkish eye color: albinism and blood
leaking into the iris. Although albinos tend to have very, very light blue eyes
due to a lack of pigment, some forms of albinism can cause eyes to appear red
or pink.
3. Amber Eyes
This beautiful, golden eye color is often confused with hazel. The difference is
that hazel eyes have brown and green in them, while amber eyes are a solid,
uniform color. With a little melanin and a whole lot of lipochrome, eyes of this
shade almost appear to be glowing! A few different animals have this eye color,
but it’s a true rarity in humans.
4. Green Eyes
Very little melanin, a burst of lipochrome, and the Rayleigh scattering of light
that reflects off the yellow stroma can make for a variety of shades of green.
With only two percent of the world’s population having green eyes, it’s
definitely rare!
Pretty purple eyes naturally occur because of a lack of pigment, but are very rare.
5. Violet Eyes
Oh, what a purplish blue! This color is most often found in people with
albinism. It is said that you cannot truly have violet eyes without albinism. Mix
a lack of pigment with the red from light reflecting off of blood vessels in the
eyes, and you get this beautiful violet!
6. Heterochromia
This is not a set color, but rather a rare eye condition where either
one iris is a different color than the other iris (David Bowie!), or
there is a spot in an iris that is an entirely different color than the rest of
the iris due to pigmentation differences.
It’s quite an unusual type of eye coloring that some individuals have, and while
many people wear contacts to make their eye color more uniform, I think it’s
beautiful, and such a rarity should be flaunted!
Now, what we do know about eye color determination is that it involves two
pigments (along with how the iris scatters lights): melanin (brown pigment) and
lipochrome (a yellow pigment). When you see someone with light, blue eyes, it
means there is an absence of melanin, or brown pigmentation.
So many people who have perfect vision choose to wear contacts just to have
a rare eye color so if you made the cut, consider yourself lucky!
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Eyes
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