Eye color test: what eye color do I have?

The eye colors

Each color has its own guide: what makes it, how to tell it from its neighbors, and the makeup and clothes that bring it out. The eye color chart puts them side by side.

Blue eyesVery little pigment in the front of the iris, so light scattering in its fibers makes it look blue.Gray eyesA pale, silvery iris with almost no pigment, often flecked with blue, green, or gold.Green eyesA little yellow-brown pigment over the blue-scattering fibers of the iris, which mixes to green.Hazel eyesTwo colors in one iris: gold or brown around the pupil, fading to green or gray toward the edge.Amber eyesOne even golden, honey, or copper color across the whole iris, without the green of hazel.Light brown eyesA medium amount of brown pigment, so the iris reads as honey, caramel, or tan in daylight.Brown eyesPlenty of brown pigment in the front of the iris, which absorbs most light and looks brown.Dark brown eyesSo much brown pigment that the iris looks nearly black indoors and shows its brown in sunlight.HeterochromiaTwo colors in one person: one eye different from the other, a patch of another color, or a ring around the pupil.

What eye color do I have? How the eye color test reads it

A face model running in your browser places 478 points on your face, five of them on each iris: its center and four points on its edge. That gives us a circle for each iris. We don’t read the whole circle:

• The pupil is cut out. The inner third of the circle is pupil and its dark edge, so we start reading 35% of the way out.
• So is the rim. Most irises have a darker ring at their edge (the limbal ring), so we stop at 92% of the way out.
• Lids and lashes stay out. The ring is cut to the outline of your eye opening, so skin and lashes that cover part of the iris aren’t read.
• The darkest and brightest pixels are dropped. We sort what’s left from dark to light and drop the darkest 30% (shadows from lashes, the deep folds of the iris) and the brightest 15% (reflections of windows and lights). The color you see is the middle of what remains.
• The light’s tint is taken out. A sunset, a lamp, or a pink-walled room tints everything in a photo, and light eyes have so little pigment of their own that the tint can make a gray-green iris read brown. The white of your eye should be close to white, so we measure the tint it picked up and remove the same tint from that iris, within limits, so a naturally yellowish white can’t push a brown eye toward blue.
• The color is named from the outer part. Many light eyes have a gold or brown ring around the pupil, so the name comes from the iris beyond 60% of the way out, the color most people see first. Your swatches show the color after the tint is taken out.

Each pixel is turned into Lab color, the color space researchers use to measure iris color from photos (Edwards et al., 2016). In plain words, Lab splits a color into three numbers: lightness (0 is black, 100 is white), color strength (how far from gray it is), and hue, an angle that says which color it is: about 40 is red-brown, 70 gold, 130 green, and 230 blue. Both eyes are read on their own and together.

The name comes from where your reading lands. First, light eye or brown eye: a brown iris has warmth, at least3 of strength at a red-brown to gold hue (15 to 75), or 5 toward olive, up to hue 100. Anything cooler or grayer is a light eye. Then these lines, in order:

A camera reads irises far duller than they look in a mirror, so the strength numbers are small. When your reading sits within a few points of a line, the result names both colors, like “between hazel and amber”.

What a photo can and can’t tell

Your iris doesn’t change color from day to day, but the light on it does, and so does what a camera records. Lamps, clothes, and makeup can make eyes look bluer, greener, or more golden, which Cleveland Clinic describes as an optical illusion. That is why the test checks the white of your eyes first: if it’s too dark or strongly tinted, your iris is too, and we ask for another photo instead of naming a color that isn’t yours.

Two colors in one eye. A ring of gold or brown right around the pupil (central heterochromia) sits inside the part we name the color from, so the test names the main color of the iris and doesn’t try to judge the ring. Two eyes of different colors are a different story: those we compare, and if they read far apart in even light, the result tells you. The heterochromia guide shows all three kinds.

Contacts, filters, and edited photos change the color a camera sees, so the test can only read what’s in the photo. Babies are a special case too: their eye color can take up to three years to settle (Cleveland Clinic). A real change in an adult’s eye color, especially in one eye, is a reason to see an eye doctor, not a photo tool.

Eye color comes from melanin in the iris (Sturm and Larsson, 2009), and the amount runs on a smooth range, not eight boxes. The names are a useful shorthand; your swatches show where you really sit.

How to take a photo for the eye color test

1. Face a window in daylight. Turn off lamps and skip the flash. Overcast daylight is best.
2. Take off your glasses and turn off beauty filters. Lenses reflect light and tint what’s behind them.
3. Look straight into the lens with your eyes open naturally. A turned head puts one eye in shadow.
4. Get close. Your eyes should fill a good part of the photo, so each iris is plenty of pixels across.
5. Hold still and tap your eyes to focus before you shoot.

Eye color is one of the three colors a color season is built from, with your skin and hair. Your result lists the seasons that often go with your eyes; the seasonal color analysis reads all three from one selfie. Your eyes are one part of your face the GoodSkin app doesn’t read: it scores your skin, with 14 traits from one selfie, including pigmentation, dark spots, and redness.