• Question: why do people have different eye colours?

    Asked by pepsicola to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      The colour of your eyes is determined by the amount of the brown pigment melanin in your eyes, which is determined by your genes. But it is more complicated than we first thought, there are about 15 different genes that affects the final colour of you eyes. You get one copy of each of these 15 genes from each parent so you can see all of the different combinations that are possible!

      If you have a mutation in one gene (so the gene doesn’t function properly) then you can have no eye colour so it looks red or pink, but this is very rare!

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