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So there are 3 things that cause eye color:

• brown from melanin
• yellowish from lipochrome
• blue from how light gets scattered in the iris (similar to how light gets scattered in the sky)

You can’t have yellow eyes because the light scattering always happens.

1 You can have light brown eyes or dark brown eyes, w more or less melanin. The brown covers up the blue so it just looks brown.

2 You can have yellow + blue, so green eyes.

3 You can have different amounts of brown pigment in different parts of the iris (usually more brown at the outside), which is called hazel.

4 Or you can have very little pigment & the light scattering gives you blue.

I think there are some not-commonly-done & risky surgeries to inject different pigment…

or you can wear colored contacts for more colors :)

So, violet-colored eyes like Elizabeth Taylor was supposed to have isn’t really possible because blue+red isn’t possible, right? I always thought that was a Hollywood gimmick anyway. In photos, her eyes range from definitely blue to slightly purple, which suggest some doctoring going on.

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Follow-up question, what gives the eyes of animals with say, yellow or other non-human eye colors their color? Does that have an impact on how they see?

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