Why does a baby's eye color change?

Babies are a whole universe of changes that occur almost daily, from their gestures to how their body functions, and the eyes do not escape this reality. At birth, most babies have gray eyes or with some grayish hue, many parents wonder why this eye color is not maintained over time. Here we tell what happens in this phenomenon.

First it is important to note that when our babies are born, the amount of active melanocytes, the pigments that are responsible for coloring the eyes associated with melanin, increases with exposure to the sun and light, resulting in the color varying.

It is common for this change to occur between the sixth and ninth month of our baby's life, and it becomes a reality in a matter of weeks and it is not until the first year that the iris will have developed enough pigment to determine what the real and definitive color of our child's eyes will be like.

These changes are perfectly normal, there will be no need to go to the pediatrician or ophthalmologist unless you see that your child's eye color only changes in one eye, so the specialist should diagnose any visual problem such as heterochromia - when the color of the eyes is not the same in both eyes.

 

 

Heterochromia is therefore a mutation in which the iris of one eye does not develop the same amount of melanin causing an abrupt change in eye color. It is harmless and does not cause major alterations. Heterochromia can cause your baby to have one eye green and the other blue, or one brown and the other green or blue, it usually occurs in light shades and affects only 0.25% of the world's population.

 

 

How will we know what color eyes my baby will have? Although the pigment changes during the first year of life, we must remember that genetics has a great influence on the baby's chances of having a certain eye color.

 

Mendel's laws in school biology show us what these patterns of genetic combinations look like, here are some examples:

Two light-eyed parents - blue or green - are more likely to have a light-eyed child, but this is not always the case. If the grandparents are light-eyed, the odds are there too. If both parents are dark-eyed, the children are likely to have the same shade of eyes. Let's remember that even though genetics is often capricious, the majority of the population has dark eyes because it is the most common, genetic inheritance is also determined by factors such as skin color, race, etc.

Many myths surrounding the change in color of children's eyes, including that they change color when the mother stops breastfeeding exclusively, which has no scientific basis whatsoever.