Why Are Babies Eyes Blue When They Are Born?
What Color Eyes Are Babies Born With? – The color of babies’ irises actually depends on melanin, a protein secreted by special cells called melanocytes that also give your baby’s skin its color. Babies whose heritage is dark-skinned are usually born with brown eyes, whereas Caucasian newborns tend to be born with blue or gray eyes.
- Since melanocytes respond to light, at birth a baby may have eyes that appear gray or blue mostly due to the lack of pigment and because he’s been in a dark womb up until now.
- As he’s exposed to more light, over time (even several years) his eye color can change.
- If the melanocytes secrete just a little more melanin, this baby may end up with blue eyes.
Just a little more melanin and his eyes will be green or hazel. Brown eyes, which are the most common, are the result of very active melanocytes secreting lots of melanin. Brown eyes are likely to remain brown throughout life. It takes about a year for the melanocytes to finish their job and for the final color to come in.
Do all babies have blue eyes when they are born?
Are All Babies Born With Blue Eyes? – It’s a common belief that all babies are born with blue eyes, but this is actually a myth. A baby’s eye colour at birth depends on genetics. Brown is also common, for example, but a newborn baby’s eyes can range in colour from slate grey to black.
Why babies are usually born with blue eyes?
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Many babies appear to have blue eyes when are born, but be aware that their color will probably change. Melanin, which is the brown pigment that provides color to our skin and eyes, has not been fully deposited in our eyes as a newborn baby. As a baby’s eyes are exposed to light, the melanin production is started in the iris.
- The iris is the colored part of the eyes that regulates how much light enters our pupils.
- When the iris contains a lot melanin, eyes appear brown.
- Less melanin gives us green, gray, or light brown eyes.
- If very small amounts of melanin is deposited then we have blue eyes.
- People diagnosed with albinism have no melanin deposited and their eyes have a pink hue.
The production of melanin increases mostly during the first year of life. At 6 months of age a baby’s eye color has usually been determined. However in some cases a babies eye color can continue to change after 6 months of age and continue to change up to 3 years.
- Green eyes can continue to change into hazel and hazel can turn into brown, but brown eyes will not turn into blue eyes.
- In 10% of the population there can be continued eye color change into adulthood.
- Even though babies are born with blue eyes, the genetics of their parents will ultimately determine thir eye color.
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Do both parents have blue eyes to have a baby with blue eyes?
Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child’s eye color. It may just give you the answer you’re looking for. According to Bruno Laeng and colleagues, from the University of Tromso, Norway, the human eye color reflects a simple, predictable and reliable genetic pattern of inheritance.
- Their studies 1, published in the Springer journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, show that blue-eyed men find blue-eyed women more attractive than brown-eyed women.
- According to the researchers, it is because there could be an unconscious male adaptation for the detection of paternity, based on eye color.
The laws of genetics state that eye color is inherited as follows:
If both parents have blue eyes, the children will have blue eyes. The brown eye form of the eye color gene (or allele) is dominant, whereas the blue eye allele is recessive. If both parents have brown eyes yet carry the allele for blue eyes, a quarter of the children will have blue eyes, and three quarters will have brown eyes.
It then follows that if a child born to two blue-eyed parents does not have blue eyes, then the blue-eyed father is not the biological father. It is therefore reasonable to expect that a man would be more attracted towards a woman displaying a trait that increases his paternal confidence, and the likelihood that he could uncover his partner’s sexual infidelity.
- Eighty-eight male and female students were asked to rate facial attractiveness of models on a computer.
- The pictures were close-ups of young adult faces, unfamiliar to the participants.
- The eye color of each model was manipulated, so that for each model’s face two versions were shown, one with the natural eye color (blue/brown) and another with the other color (brown/blue).
The participants’ own eye color was noted. Both blue-eyed and brown-eyed women showed no difference in their preferences for male models of either eye color. Similarly, brown-eyed men showed no preference for either blue-eyed or brown-eyed female models.
However, blue-eyed men rated blue-eyed female models as more attractive than brown-eyed models. In a second study, a group of 443 young adults of both sexes and different eye colors were asked to report the eye color of their romantic partners. Blue-eyed men were the group with the largest proportion of partners of the same eye color.
According to Bruno Laeng and colleagues, “It is remarkable that blue-eyed men showed such a clear preference for women with the same eye color, given that the present experiment did not request participants to choose prospective sexual mates, but only to provide their aesthetic or attractiveness responsesbased on face close-up photographs.” Blue-eyed men may have unconsciously learned to value a physical trait that can facilitate recognition of own kin.1.
When can babies see color?
5 to 8 months –
During these months, control of eye movements and eye-body coordination skills continue to improve. Depth perception, which is the ability to judge if objects are nearer or farther away than other objects, is not present at birth. It is not until around the fifth month that the eyes are capable of working together to form a three-dimensional view of the world and begin to see in-depth. Although an infant’s color vision is not as sensitive as an adult’s, it is generally believed that babies have good color vision by 5 months of age. Most babies start crawling at about 8 months old, which helps further develop eye-hand-foot-body coordination. Early walkers who did minimal crawling may not learn to use their eyes together as well as babies who crawl a lot.
What age is a babies eye color permanent?
– Your baby’s first birthday is a significant milestone, especially if they get to dive into a cake for the first time. But it’s also about the age you can safely say your baby’s eye color is set. “Typically, a baby’s eyes can change color during the first year of life,” says Benjamin Bert, MD, an ophthalmologist at Memorial Care Orange Coast Medical Center.
However, Daniel Ganjian, MD, a pediatrician at Providence Saint John’s Health Center, says the most significant changes in color occur between 3 and 6 months. But the hue you see at 6 months may still be a work in progress — which means you should wait a few months (or more) before filling in the eye color section of the baby book.
Although you can’t predict the exact age your baby’s eye color will be permanent, the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) says most babies have the eye color that will last their lifetime by the time they’re about 9 months old. However, some can take up to 3 years to settle into a permanent eye color.
63% brown20.8% blue 5.7% green/hazel9.9% indeterminate0.5% partial heterochromia (a variation in coloration)
The researchers also found that there were significantly more white/Caucasian infants with blue eyes and more Asian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Black/African American infants with brown eyes. Now that you have a better understanding of when your baby’s eyes may change color (and become permanent), you might be wondering what’s going on behind the scenes to make this transformation occur.
Can two blue-eyed parents have a child without blue eyes?
Can two parents with blue eyes have a child with brown eyes? Yes, blue-eyed parents can definitely have a child with brown eyes. Or green or hazel eyes for that matter. If you stayed awake during high school biology, you might find this answer surprising.
- We were all taught that parents with blue eyes have kids with blue eyes.
- Every time.
- This has to do with the fact that blue eyes are supposed to be recessive to brown eyes.
- This means that if a parent has a brown eye gene, then that parent will have brown eyes.
- Which makes it impossible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child – they don’t have a brown eye gene to pass on! In fact, this is the model we used for our eye color calculator.* And that we talk about extensively here at Ask a Geneticist.
Blue-eyed parents can have kids with brown eyes. (Image via Shutterstock) Now we aren’t being dishonest or trying to hide anything by presenting this model. It works great most of the time. But as with anything genetic, there are always exceptions. For example, DNA can and does change between generations.
So if a change happened that turned a blue eye color gene into a brown one, then blue-eyed parents could have a brown-eyed child. As you might guess, this sort of thing is pretty rare. Too rare to explain all the exceptions we see with eye color. So something else must be going on. That something is most likely other genes involved in eye color that we don’t know about.
Eye color used to be presented as a fairly simple trait. A big part of the model was the idea that we had an eye color gene that came in two varieties – brown and blue. Geneticists represented the brown version as “B” and the blue version as “b”. The model also said that blue (b) was recessive to brown (B).
This matters because it is an explanation for how brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child. See, we have two copies of each of our genes – one from each biological parent. This means there are three possible combinations for this eye color gene: BB, Bb, and bb. BB is of course brown and in this model, bb would be blue.
Since blue is recessive to brown, Bb people have brown eyes. But they can pass a “b” down to their kids, who might end up with blue eyes. Now eye color is obviously more complicated than this. This model doesn’t explain green eyes for example. Scientists added a second gene to try to explain green eyes but we don’t need to go into that here ( to learn more about the two-gene model).
| Genes | What it Means |
| BB | Brown eyes |
| B b | Brown eyes |
| bb | Not brown eyes |
Again, bb people should not be able to pass on brown eyes to their kids. But we know they can. Which means that this model is incomplete (or wrong). The results I just put into the previous table are theoretical and based on the model I talked about. Here are some actual results I adapted from ‘s website:
| Genes | What it Means in Europeans |
| BB |
|
| B b |
|
| bb |
|
As you can see, the original model holds up pretty well for BB and bb people. Most BB people have brown eyes and most bb people don’t. But the model clearly doesn’t explain the following:
- 1% of bb people have brown eyes
- 1% of BB people have blue eyes (and 14% have green)
- 44% of Bb people do not have brown eyes
The biggest disconnect is with Bb people. Only 56% have brown eyes. If this holds up, I am not sure we can even call blue and green recessive to brown. Whatever the reason, these data give some clues about how two blue-eyed parents might have a brown-eyed child.
For example, imagine two parents are Bb and have blue eyes. They each pass a B down to one of their children. That child will be BB and most likely have brown eyes. This example uses known data to show how blue-eyed parents might have a child with brown eyes. But it doesn’t explain why a Bb person has blue eyes in the first place.
To do this, we need to guess what other genes may be doing. And how they might be affecting the original eye color gene. Going into detail about these possibilities would need more space than I have here! And in the end, the truth is that eye color is a complex trait that we don’t fully understand yet.
At what age do blue eyes turn brown?
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Eye color isn’t set in stone until age 2. (Image credit: sxc.hu, user ‘maplec’) While only 1 in 5 Caucasian adults have blue eyes in the United States, most are born blue-eyed. Their irises change from blue to hazel or brown during infancy. Why? “It has to do with the amount of melanin they’re born with and how that melanin increases after birth,” said Norman Saffra, Chairman of Ophthalmology at Maimonedes Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.
- Melanin, Saffra explained, is a pigment, and the more you have of it in your eyes, hair and skin, the darker they are, and thus the more sunlight they reflect.
- A small deposit of melanin in the irises — the muscular rings around the pupils — makes them appear blue, while a medium amount makes them green or hazel, and a lot of it makes the irises brown.
Babies aren’t born with all the melanin they are destined to have. “The maturation process continues post-utero,” Saffra told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site of LiveScience. “Eye color isn’t set until 2 years of age.” He likened the gradual buildup of melanin in the irises to chicks developing feathers after birth.
Though some babies of non-white ethnicities also have blue eyes at birth which then brown over time, the effect is far less common than with Caucasian babies. ” Darkly-pigmented individuals usually have brown-eyed babies, because the babies have more pigment to start out with,” Saffra said. Original article on Live Science,
Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
- Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope.
- Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science.
She was the 2016 winner of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics.