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

John:
> 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.)
>
> 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
>
> Most people with variable eye color have moderate to slight melanin,
> giving them a general range of blue-gray-green-hazel
Interesting -- I had forgotten this, though I read up on it a bit
when my son's eyes turned brown (I was trying to explain to his
brown-eyed mother that he wasn't going to keep his Mel Gibson
eyes).

Since Livagians are partly characterized by those properties judged
in terms of which I would be normal, the typical Livagian iris has
a tawny corona around the pupil, surrounded by a pale blue-grey
ring, surrounded by a dark blue-grey outer ring. I have no idea
how common this is outside Livagia, but I have just gone & stared
at the eyes of the two other people in my home at the minute, and find
that one, a nonrelative, has a very similar pattern.

--And.