Every morning when my bi-eyed Siberian husky comes to greet me, I take her face in my hands and give her a chin kiss in between her blue eye and her brown eye. In other words, I put my chin between her eyes and make kissing sounds. This beautiful creature’s different colored eyes fascinated me so much that I had to do a little research. I learned that the unique condition with irises of two different colors is known as complete heterochromia. When only part of one iris is a different color than the rest of it, the condition is called partial heterochromia and central heterochromia results when a central ring is a different color than the outer iris.
Heterochromia occurs not only in dogs, cats, cattle and horses, but also in humans. Children born with genetic heterochromia are less likely to have problems with their eyes or general health than adults who get acquired heterochromia later in life due to eye injuries and a number of medical problems.
During this research mission, I gleaned a few other tidbits about eye color. Eye color is the result of melanin deposits in the iris. While blue eyes have small amounts of melanin, brown eyes have the most. A baby’s blue eyes can darken in the first few years because of melanin development. Know what the rarest eye color is? Green. Only one out of every ten Americans has green eyes. It was interesting to this hazel-eyed author to learn that only 18% of the American population has this color in one form or another. Brown is the most common color. In fact, every eye color is actually some shade of brown due to melanin inside the iris. It is actually light bouncing off the melanin that creates greens and blues.
If you are unhappy with your eye color, you may have the option of changing it with colored contact lenses. If you are a rare bi-eyed person, you can either change the color of one eye with a contact, or just revel in the fact that you are unique. Whatever color you have, you are fortunate to have vision. Be sure to take care of your eyes and see a ophthalmologist regularly….which reminds me, I need to make an appointment.
