dominanefret

Alyssa recently posted an entry about people arguing or disagreeing over each others or their own eye colors.

For example, my mother swears her eyes are hazel. If anyone tells her otherwise she lets them know in clear certain terms that they are wrong. Her eyes are hazel.

My mother's eyes are most definitely without any doubt blue. There is nothing "hazel" about them in the slightest. There is nothing green about them.

Now this brings me to the limitations of the system we have for naming eye color. Apparently eyes are only supposed to be blue, green, grey, brown, and "hazel" - whatever that means. The word hazel gets in to murky territory for me, because people use hazel in so many different ways, it's like the catch all of eye colors. Anything that doesn't fit in to blue, green, grey, or brown is called hazel. I've heard people call blue-green eyes hazel, I've heard them call that blue color with brown speckles hazel, that really really light brown color, the greenish brown or brownish green, the color that is almost orange. So what is hazel?

It used to be thought that eye color was determined through genetics the way that most dominant and submissive genes are. Both of your parents have a submissive eye color? You will have a submissive eye color. One parent has a dominant eye color, one has a submissive, three out of four kids will have the dominant eye color. So on and so forth. I remember doing a science experiment in elementary school on genetics tracking eye color, where I went to a bunch of families and tracked the eye colors of their extended families several generations back. On my Dad's side of the family I discovered that my Grandfather had blue eyes, my Grandmother had grey eyes, my aunt had bluish grey eyes, and my Dad had brown eyes. I completely freaked out and was convinced that because my Grandmother had a baby who died only a day after being born a few years before my father, that she must have been afraid it would happen again and adopted my dad.

Since then it has been proven that not only can eye color skip generations, like hair color, new eye colors can form. It is possible to have your own personal eye color, not inherited from your mother or father but created from a combination of genes from both sides of the family.

That is I believe what happened to me. My fathers eyes are EXTREMELY dark brown, and my moms are a vivid blue. Maybe the brightness of her eyes is why she calls them hazel.

I've had people call my eyes a variety of different colors. Brown, dark brown, light brown, hazel, greenish brown, reddish brown.

I like to call them Amber. Like the resin. I think they really are the color of the stone.

A picture, for reference: