Why do most babies eyes start out as blue and then change color as the baby grows?
The color of our eyes comes from melanin, the pigment that also colors our hair and skin. At birth, a baby’s body isn’t finished producing this pigment yet. Over the first year of life, as our eyes develop and our bodies produce more melanin, our irises gradually change from “baby” blue to their permanent color. So, what produces the color in green or hazel or brown or black eyes? Actually, despite the many different colors that our eyes can have, the color of the actual pigment in all of them is exactly the same. Melanin only comes in one shade — yellow-brown. The variations in eye colors come not from the *color* of the pigment in the iris, but rather from the *amount* of the pigment our iris produces. As more melanin is produced, the eye’s color changes from light blue to dark blue to green to hazel to brown. You might be wondering why newborn babies’ eyes are blue, rather than some other color, like pink or white. Actually, at birth, our irises don’t have much color at all. In nat
