Baby Blues: Baby Eye Color

I hope to have kids someday. My fiancé and I often joke about which traits of ours each child will get. Whose height? Whose intelligence?

What about eyes? What color will our baby’s eyes be? His eyes are brown and mine are blue.

The inheritance of eye color has become increasingly more difficult to predict. Each parent contributes genetic material to the child and those genes mix and match in many ways. But a child’s eye color is not simply a blend of the parents’ color.

A child’s eye color is determined by the genes passed down from his or her parents. According to All About Vision, it’s more likely for two brown-eyed parents to have a blue-eyed child than for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child. The blue-eyed trait can be passed from generation to generation by brown-eyed people until the lighter colored genes match up. But it is also possible for children to have a completely different eye color than either of their parents.

The most common eye colors are green, blue and brown. When it comes to the gene pool, darker colors tend to dominate. Brown eyes are dominant over blue and green eyes, while green eyes trump blue eyes.

A baby’s blue eyes may darken in their first three years if a pigment called melanin develops. As an adult, dramatic eye color changes can be a sign of certain diseases, so see your Indiana eye care doctor like Dr. Tavel and his board certified associates if this occurs.