Open your eyes! Discover the colours of your iris

What colours exist in the human iris?

Do you know the true colours of your eyes? 😲 They are more than just blue, brown, green or grey! Join us on a fascinating journey into the world of the iris and discover why every eye colour is unique! 🌈

For the fast readers: officially we distinguish four different colours — brown, blue, grey and green

For those who read fast: officially we distinguish four different colours — brown, blue, grey and green.*

Do me a favour: take a quick look in the mirror or grab your phone and shoot a selfie. Zoom in. What colour do you have? Blue? Brown? Green? Grey? A mix of all of them?

About 8 billion people live on this planet (the theoretical threshold was reached on 15.11.2022) — and every iris is unique.

How many brown/blue eyes are there worldwide?

Surface: thread-like (spaghetti structure) visible

Strength: recessive vs. brown, more dominant vs. blue/grey

Layers: 52 iris pigment layers

Structure: varies from person to person

Light sensitivity: medium

But other providers show green eyes on their website!

What if you actually do have green eyes?

About 8 billion people live on this planet — and every iris is unique.

Grey iris

Take a guess: what percentage of the 8 billion people worldwide has your eye colour? The answer comes at the very end. A little fun fact: 90 % of the Finnish population has blue eyes.

Brown is the most common eye colour of all. A brown iris has the property of being less light-sensitive than the others. That's because nature had its reasons during evolution 🤓 — back then, there wasn't an optician on every corner.

You can roughly compare a brown iris to dark clothing — energy (in our case light) is absorbed instead of being reflected immediately, the way it is with light-coloured clothes. Brown defends its top spot because dark pigmentation is dominant in reproduction.

Surface: rather rough, sandy

Strength: dominant

Layers: 52 iris pigment layers

Structure: varies from person to person

Light sensitivity: low(er)

Blue iris

We're often fascinated by light-coloured eyes. Why? Because they're rarer — and that makes them feel more special. You get maximum attention when people of colour with blue eyes suddenly appear. Remember Jeremy Meeks?

Unlike the brown iris, the blue iris is recessive and would most likely lose out when paired with a brown iris in reproduction.

Surface: thread-like (spaghetti structure)

Strength: recessive

Layers: 52 iris pigment layers

Structure: varies from person to person

Light sensitivity: medium to high

Little fun fact: blue eyes are actually a genetic mutation and weren't really planned in evolution.

Green eyes are an optical illusion!

I have green eyes!

Oops, almost forgot — here's the quiz answer:

Now the know-it-all in me comes out 🤓: grey isn't a colour. Grey is the middle between black and white and belongs to the contrasts. What people mean by «grey» is actually a very light blue — causally linked to the body's melanin balance.

Surface: thread-like (spaghetti structure)

Strength: recessive

Layers: 52 iris pigment layers

Structure: varies from person to person,

Light sensitivity: rather high

Green iris

There is no green pigment in the human body. Green is a blend of many blue iris pigment layers and a few light-brown layers — usually caused by the parents' genetic baseline. Humans only reflect the light around us — so on a lovely beach with white sand, eyes can look genuinely green.

If you think you actually have green pigment in your iris: book an appointment with us (preferably with me directly in Lucerne) — and if that really turns out to be true, you get the iris photo shoot completely free plus a 30 × 30 cm print on acrylic or Alu-Dibond as a gift!

This statistic can't be 100 % accurate — but it's a good indicator.

Brown iris