Once or twice a year I go through the trouble of going to the eye doctor. It can be aggravating, then exasperation while waiting to be called next, not to mention those awful drops that dilate your pupils and make everything fuzzy for hours.
My appointment is always made months ahead so the doctor will be sure to get my repeat business without interruption. Am I a patient or a customer?
I never gave much thought to the colour of my eyes until one day at work. The section I worked in had about 20 staff. One lunchtime, a heated discussion arose. One guy called me a blue-eyed bas….d. I was confused. When I scanned the table of second-generation Portuguese employees with a few Spaniards thrown in, I noticed they all had brown eyes. I was the outsider. I was known as the ‘blue-boy’ from then on.
The same guy who brought up the eyes was trying to sell his uncle’s two-year-old Oldsmobile for 30 per cent off the blue-book value. I was interested, that is until I found out the reason for the good price. His uncle had been killed in the car in a mob hit – some blood stains couldn’t be removed. It gave me the shudders.
Later, I discovered that blue eyes are not actually blue at all. It sounds crazy, but here’s no such thing as blue pigment. You’re either melanated or not very melanated at all. And if you’re melanated in each layer of the iris like most of humans, then you would have eyes that are brown
According to the Academy of Ophthalmology, blue eyes look blue for the same reason that both the ocean and the sky appear to be blue: it’s simply a trick of the light. This is called the Tyndall Effect, which is the way that light scatters in blue eyes, giving rise to the blue appearance. Fascinating
Although there are a ton of actors, models, and other celebs who have blue eyes, which can make these colored eyes seem like a common asset, not all that many people are lucky enough to boast baby blues. In fact, the most common eye color throughout the entire world is brown, according to an article in World Atlas. Specifically, 79 percent of human beings have eyes the color of coffee and chocolate, dwarfing every other eye color as the dominant.
World Atlas estimates that approximately 8 to 10 percent of human beings have sapphire peepers. Of course, plenty of folks who don’t have blue eyes can modify with contacts. But you can always tell the difference between a natural blue and an artificial blue – it’s a hard color to fake.
Although blue eyes are still a small majority in Ireland and Scotland, the United States and Spain come in number nine and ten, both with just over 16 percent of the population.
It might sound a little bit crazy, but your eye color can have an impact on the quality of your vision, according to my optometrist, “Because of the lack of pigment in lighter color eyes, you get a lot more unwanted light that can create glare problems.”
A researcher in Denmark has concluded that every blue-eyed person in the world is related. That’s because every human being that existed up until around 6,000 or 10,000 years ago had brown eyes. Holy smokes, I must have about half a billion cousins out there.
Blue-eyed people are also more likely to develop a skin condition known as vitiligo. I have vitiligo spots for years. In the wintertime, I’m self-[conscious about the white patches around my eye area. I pretend that that my blue eyes compensate for that substandard feature.
Lately, the Tonometer at the optometrist’s lab has shown my eye pressure readings are increasing. The eye doctor has me taking drops in my eyes every evening. Sheila puts them in for me. Either her aim is bad, or I close an eye too soon, but it is a nightly hassle just the same.
During my last eye examination, I asked if the eye doctor was biased towards better treat for brown eyes, as he has brown eyes. He calmly said, “Every eye-colour helps to bring me closer to retirement.”
