They say that the eyes are the window to a person’s soul. Look in a person’s eyes and you can often read them and see their feelings, emotions, and mood. The eyes of a person can be warm and bright or cold and stray and we can know it all by just looking at them.
The iris is the part of the eye that produces your eye color and most often catches our attention when reading a person’s eyes. It is a thin, circular piece of tissue, responsible for controlling the diameter and size of the pupil. It works much like a camera’s aperture, regulating light levels and helping us focus. The color of the iris varies from person to person and is one of our traits that are responsible for giving each of us our unique appearance. In ancient times, diviners would study a person’s iris and based on the unique characteristics would determine the individual’s destiny.
As early as the 1950s, scientists and health professionals suggested that the unique characteristics of the iris could be used for identification purposes. It was not until much later, however, that a system to recognize and catalog these identification points was developed. The technology used for iris scanning targets about 250 unique features of the iris to determine identity. That is five times as many as fingerprinting. The error rate is about one in a million—even less when you correlate it with other biometric scanning like fingerprinting and facial recognition. Because of the many tiny elevations and depressions in the iris, false negatives are about ten times less common in iris scanning than in facial recognition.
ID scanning of the iris is fascinating; however, the variety of eye color is what interests most people. Eye color is determined by the amount of melanin (pigment) in the iris tissue. More melanin means darker eyes and less melanin means lighter eyes. Three pigment colors determine the iris color. A green iris for example, has blue and some yellow while a brown iris contains mostly brown. Brown eyes have the most melanin, green eyes less, and blue eyes have no melanin.
Other interesting eye color facts:
- Brown eyes are the most common eye color in the world with over 80% of the world's population having brown eyes.
- Hazel eyes have a higher concentration of melanin around the eye's border, which can result in a multi-colored appearance that varies between copper and green depending on the lighting. About 10% of the world's population has hazel-colored eyes.
- Approximately 8% of the world's population has blue eyes.
- Green eye color is the rarest color found around the world, estimated at only 2%.
- Silver eye color along with grey and black are also quite rare, although many consider silver eyes to be a variation of blue eye color.
- The first blue-eyed person lived 6,000-10,000 years ago.
- Blue-eyed people share a common ancestor with every other blue-eyed person in the world.
At your next eye exam in our office, remember to ask us to photograph your iris! Under magnification and bright light, your iris color may surprise you. You can reach us in Stillwater at 405-372-1715. We also invite you to visit us at www.cockrelleyecare.com and like us on Facebook or Instagram at Cockrell Eyecare Center!