If you have been metaphorically an apple of someone’s eyes, then perhaps you won’t mind this breaking scientific revelation, which some media found worth choosing a lead for its science page.
But then again, if you literally (actually here) have blue eyes and in your childhood or younger days, had taken pride in them for being the blue-eyed boy or the girl for someone who meant much to you in whatever authoritative capacity, you lately stand a chance for a low-down feeling because of what is claimed to be a new finding. Your blue eyes are not actually blue. The credit goes to the lower level of melanin in the iris of your eyes that determines what colour they should look.
But like skin colour, where the melanin in low concentration plays the key role unless you have actually sun-burnt yourself to dark brown or if like the legendary Michael Jackson, you have had your skin grafted colourless, either with the help of a plastic surgeon, or through a skin-whitening commercial product, the effectiveness of which is a great debate of science, but then whose soaring success is without question in a colour obsessed society like ours. This news about the role of melanin in the iris of your eyes may have brought worries to some social activists who essentially oppose the use of the fairness creams for growing fair or fairer still. Their agony is that now some company may actually want to invest in lab research for a cosmetic eye drop, which can at least remotely claim to change the colour of your eyes with insignificant disclaimers. But then it may be complicated. By fairness in the eyes, blue as a colour has been most eulogized in literature and in the fashion world. At least courtesy the oft-quoted cliché of a phrase that use the colour blue brazenly. But then there are varieties—amber, brown, gray, green, hazel, red and violet, and of course, the majority us the black. Then there are shades of these colours, the light and the light mixed versions. A possible cosmetic eye-drop has a huge potential market out there if backed by a good advertising scheme.
For a skeptic backed by science, colour is a mere illusion, whether on skin or in the eyes, but then one wonders what plans the Mother Nature had when it made some regions eye colour specific. While in Finland and Estonia, we have 89 per cent of the blue-eyed population, Morocco and Tunisia sit at the bottom of the table with 2 and 1 percent respectively. It is time international dictionaries should delete the phrase blue-eyed in their new editions to help fight this optical racism in literature and in the fashion industry. local dictionaries must scientifically explain our black eyes. They are actually dark brown.