Recently I was looking at some old baby pictures and noticed that my eyes appeared blue. I stared at the picture with confusion, trying to convince myself that it wasn’t me. Maybe my parents switched me with some other baby way back when. I know for a fact that all my life I have had brown eyes, so why did they appear blue? Since eye color was on my mind, I couldn’t help but to pay attention to everyone’s eye color around me. I oddly noticed that my best friend, who I thought to have blue eyes, had eyes that appeared to be green. I was thinking 
maybe the green shirt she was wearing was at fault because eyes can’t really change color, can they?
Scientists have done studies observing the change of eye color past childhood. One study includes the Louisville Twin Study. The objective of this study was to determine whether eye color changes after 6 years of age. In order to come to a conclusion, the team observed the eyes of twins and parents of twins for multiple years. They measured color by comparing the color seen on the subject to 1 of 15 painted glass eye anterior segments. They concluded that most individuals do in fact achieve stable eye color by 6 years of 
age. However, there were still 10% to 15% subjects whose eyes were changing color throughout adolescence and adulthood. Although there is a large correlation between genes and eye color, there are still other variable that may affect not only the color, but also the change of it.
Pascal D Imesch, Ingolf H.L. Wallow, and Daniel M. Albert, worked together to research other reasons for the change in eye color. They focused on medical conditions that may cause a change in pigmentation of the iris. They found that Iris color could be affected by a variety of ocular disorders. In other words, the color of your eye can change if certain eye conditions and diseases are present. Diseases such as Horner’s syndrome and Fuchs’ heterochromic iridocyclitis affect iris color by decreasing the pigmentation. Horner’s syndrome is caused by the disruption of a nerve pathway from the brain to the face and eye on one side of the body. This may occur as a result of having a stroke, tumor or spinal cord injury. Fuchs’ heterochromic iridocyclitis is the chronic mild inflammation of the front part of the eye. It may occur due to a 
formation of cataracts or due to glaucoma.
Clearly, it is possible for your eyes to change color during your lifetime, in fact it’s completely normal especially as an infant. Also, it is clear that eye color is not solely based on genetics; there is a possibility that eye conditions may be affecting your eye color as well. When it comes to noticing the “magical” change in eye color of your friends, you never know they can be wearing color contacts or certain colors to purposely bring out the pigments in their iris!
I find this article very interesting. Once, a friend of mine told me that her eye color changes often. I barely listened to her an figured she was just seeing things or something. How could her eye color change? Mine never has. I later realized that she was actually telling the truth and that her eye color often did change between green, blue an a grayish color. It was very surprising to me, but I never really looked any further into it and never found an answer either. From reading this blog post, I decided to look it up and out more about the subject. According to this site, eye color can change when the pupil size changes. As the pupil compresses or expands, it also compresses or expands the pigments, which in turn change colors. This can happen due to mood changes etc. which I find extremely interesting.
This is a very interesting topic! I have green eyes, and the only time I experience any color change is the morning after I spend the night crying. In that situation, my eyes are practically glowing green; they are extremely bright. I looked into it and couldn’t find any reasonable explanations. I also agree with the previous comments. Eye color definitely seems to change depending on surroundings aka the color clothes you’re wearing or how light/dark it is outside.
I think your topic is really interesting and it’s amazing to me that people’s eyes can actually change color. As to your blue eyes, I found that researchers conclude in thisarticle that “Several studies have shown that the OCA2 locus is the major contributor to the human eye color variation. By linkage analysis of a large Danish family, we finemapped the blue eye color locus to a 166 Kbp region within the HERC2 gene.” So, yes, genes play an important role in determining eye color. It’s fantastic that we can prove humans’ eyes magically change and also locate exactly what specific gene is causing eyes to be the particular color through science. It reminds me one of the claims in class: to the extent that science can ever prove anything.
When I was younger I had grey-blue eyes which confused my parents because my mother has brown eyes and my father has hazel/green eyes. Another thing they noticed was that as the seasons changed, my eye color changed as well. As I got older, my eyes darkened to my father’s eye color which is hazel/green. My eyes still change colors but not because of weather. If I wear a grey-toned shirt, my eyes will appear to be grey-blue just like when I was a child. So I don’t think that genetics has everything to do with eyes changing colors. I think it also has something to do with light and the way our eyes reflect that light. Light and colors are very closely related. So sometimes our eyes perceive colors in different lights to be a different color than their eyes perceived them to be before.