Re: OT: Mood-reflective eye-colour (WAS: Re: The Melting)

En réponse à John Cowan :

>Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > Do you know what causes this unusual effect? I can't off-hand think of any
> > explanation ...
>
>There is only one pigment in the iris, and that's melanin.  No melanin =
>albinism = pink eyes, slight melanin = blue or gray eyes, moderate
>melanin = green or hazel eyes, lots of melanin = brown or black eyes.
>(There are only two other pigments that account for the entire range
>of human colorations: red hemoglobin and orange/brown carotene.)
How can you get purple eyes then? A fourth, extremely rare, pigment?

>It's common enough to have variable pigmentation in different parts of
>the iris: my eyes look blue to most people until one looks closely,
>and then green flecks are visible, reflecting my green-eyed mother.
>(Pure blueness is recessive; my father and half-siblings have pure
>pure blue eyes.)  In Classical times, when the prevailing languages
>didn't have a word for "blue" in general, I'm sure my eyes would
>have been labeled gray.
I think the most beautiful eyes I ever saw were from a man who had one eye
of an extremely beautiful blue, while the other was half-blue, half-green,
with a razor-sharp limit between the two halves.

>Most people with variable eye color have moderate to slight melanin,
>giving them a general range of blue-gray-green-hazel.
People have often difficulties to tell which eye colour I have. I once
asked a group of friends, and they were nicely 50-50 split between green
and blue :)) . But in my case, light has some importance, as well as the
fact that the sun tends to make my eyes bluer (not "look bluer". They
really get bluer when I'm often in the sun, and go back to a more greenish
hue when I am less often in the sun). In most cases, I have green eyes.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

Replies