• Question: Why are our eyes different colours to everyone elses? What makes them different colours?

    Asked by sciencerules49 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Kate Husband

      Kate Husband answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      I think it’s linked to how dark your skin is. The darker the skin the darker your eyes and presumably that’s because if your out in the sun all day long your eyes need protecting to so that’s why we evolved like that.

    • Photo: Matthew Pankhurst

      Matthew Pankhurst answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      The way we appear, like our eye colour, height, number of fingers etc is set up by our DNA. This “blueprint” or “plan” is called our genotype. Everyone has a different genotype, some are more similar than others, but everyone is unique. How these genes are expressed (how they work or how well they work) can often be influenced by our environment. For example, if we don’t eat well enough when we are little we might not grow as big as our genotype had in the “plan”. Our eyes have a large number of genes that all influence the ‘plan’, so our eyes are all kinds of shades and colours, and as they are very complex things maybe everyone has different ones. I’d ask a geneticist if I were you – they could probably blow your mind with stuff about eye colour!

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