Alright after some research it has come to my attention that amber eyes are a natural color. What i can't seem to figure out is how they come about. I know it is a mutation but of what eye color? Is it common to a specific nationality? Can a child inherit the mutation? I can't seem to find this information anywhere.
You mean hazelnut colored eyes? I think it's a freak genetic kind of thing. My mother has hazelnut colored eyes. She's caucasian and her father had blue eyes, I believe, while her mother had brown eyes. Have you tried wikipedia by any chance?
I think that "amber eyes" can mean either a pale brown shade of colour or a mix of green/brown, usually brown close to the pupil. Which one you mean?The first can be rarely found in middle east and maghreb, the latter is more common in Europe and usually it's the result of a cross between a parent with green eyes and one with brown eyes. At least this is my case.
After another whole day of searching for the answer and getting nothing I broke down and e-mailed a geneticist. Hopefully I will have the answer I need soon enough. As you can see it is not really brown but more of a bronzish/gold color. I have a few pictures all the way up to pure yellow as well.
I have read the term but I sm not exactly sure I understand what they mean by dichromatic. Does it limit the light spectrum that one can see? When looking it up I keep getting color blindness with the term.
If you look at that picture, you will see two different shades of brown, which is what dichromatic means ( di=2 chromatic=color). I'm almost positive that amber is a shade of hazel. Hazel eyes come in a variety of colors, some that actually change depending on light since the iris muscles contract and relax in different lights. Hazel can range from a slate blue/green color to light brown with flecks of gold. I'd look into the recessive genes that bring about hazel, as well as if Blue is considered dominant to hazel or recessive.
I'm not sure if it matters what descent the character is.. you can get all kinds of odd things without any explanation. Brown eyes are dominant over blue or green. Sometimes people "hit the genetic lottery" (as one of my docs said about my tumor) and end up with odd things that make no sense. Plus some people's eyes do change colors. Me, my mom, and my sister all have eyes that change colors. My bf swears mine change colors if I'm mad or depressed. (whether or not that is possible I do not know. lol) Then there's his eyes that sometimes look brown and other times greener. Is is possible this color is a result of a hazel or brown that changes color from time to time? Just some thoughts. Please tell us what the geneticist says. I'm very curious now.
I agree, sorry for the bichromatic italinglish word...I didn't check the vocabolary... Hazel eyes can look almost completely green under strong light or brown when it's dark.
My cousin has eyes this color, light brown "cat eyes" that are almost mesmerizing to look at. Most of my mothers family has some variant of hazel, from green to brown. My moms are a kind of jade green, mine are brownish with green in them and my son has the most beautiful green and gold. I don't know much about genetics but...My husband has bright blue eyes and our oldest still ended up with hazel. The youngest has gunmetal colored eyes and I don't know if they would be considered a true blue or not. Anyway, just an example.
My grandma has "amber" eyes. My mum and brother also have hazel eyes though my brother has gone more green than they have. I think for it to come out you need a lot of blue eyes in the family, because browns are more dominant and would squash the colour. Blue is the most recessive eye colour gene so the fact I have blue eyes means my grandad did as well (I never met him due to him being 8000 miles away so I can't say for sure ) and probably one of my grandma's parents. A very strong Scandinavian influence on that side of my family, so the hazels are pretty uninterrupted and allowed to be the more dominant eye colour. I guess it's just chance that when my mum came to England my dad had blue eyes too (he's more celtic than scandinavian - dark hair and blue eyes but it amounts to the same with eye genetics... though clearly derailed something since my brother's just normal hazel instead of yellow-y). So... the brown-eyed person would be very far back in the family history, and they'd all have to be blue or hazel-eyed to get to amber eyes.
Amber eyes - I think I have 'em They look light brown, rust like in normal lighting, then in the sun- this is what happens....freaky!
If you're not sure which is dominant or recessive, just have a parent with each. If the trait is recessive, then it can be assumed that the other parent is a carrier. If it's dominant, it was inherited from the parent with that trait. Works either way.
I keep trying to upload a pic for you guys. Hopefully it will show up. I have red hair, (used to dye it blackish- naturally red though) My eyes are "yellow" in the sun. In regular light they are rusty brown- not dark though. My father's eyes were blue, and mother's are deep brown- no yellow or rust. My daughter's eyes are a deep khaki green and her father's eyes are hazel-blue green.
Mutation? Perhaps... Okay firstly, I know I'm going to sound weird, but here goes nothing... the whole recessive and dominant theory that the majority of people commonly know doesn't explain everything. Basically, it goes something like this> Brown is dominant over Green and both of those are dominant over Blue. However, there is no consideration or rare colours such as Amber, Violet and even Pink... (albino). Personally, in my family, blue is more dominant over brown (i'm not kidding here...) I'm the only person in the family whose had brown eyes for generations. Anyway, off topic (sorta), you wanted to know whether or not Amber eyes is a mutation or not? Truth be told, is probably is. You see, Amber eyes are considered to be a golden brown or hazel eyes... but at the end of the day, it comes down to how much yellow pigment called lipochrome is situated in the actual eye. This type of pigment is commonly found in Green eyes (Fact: Only 2% of the worlds population has Green eyes). Now, tell me if this makes sense, or if i've gone completely mad: If you have one or two green eye parents, you have a higher possible chance of having Amber eyes or golden brown eyes then parents who have hazel eyes, brown eyes, blue eyes, or even grey eyes. Reason, the pigment or the amount of melanin within it... Now before you tell me i'm mad, I already KNOW that fact, but for all know at my young age, (i'm still in school) i could be wrong... Yet again, we all could be wrong about it, one way or another. I plan to study genetics when i'm at uni, so by then i may have a better, more profound understanding... 'Til then, this is all i can say for now... ONE last thing, if you don't already know, I DO have Amber eyes... i hate it when people say their brown or get them confused with hazel... Also another note for those who care, if you have noticed that someone or a lot of your relatives have Green eyes, Hazel eyes that have yellow or gold/orange pigment in the iris, and you personally have Amber coloured eyes, that could explain it... Thank you for Reading (if you have done so) P.S I also have a green-grey ring in one of my eyes... if that further proves my theory...
This is actually one of the most helpful of anything I have read to date on amber eyes. The whole dominant-recessive THEORY you go on about is actually something I was going to touch on in my story and the fact that amber is a branch of green is probably the most helpful piece of information I heard. To be honest I was banking it being on a branch with brown eyes but green makes just as much sense to me.
Sounds good to me! I agree, like you.... I have amber eyes...not brown! Not that brown eyes cannot be beautiful, because they certainly are, but I have now embraced my weird yellow orange eyes... finally! Hazel is much different, typically more speckled-ish and green to brown, green to blue etc., not amber/yellow as the predominant color.
Well, the thing is, most traits aren't determined by a single gene, including eye color. An example of a trait determined by two genes is coat color in Labradors - one gene determines what color pigment (brown or black, black dominant) the dog has, and the other gene determines whether pigment ends up everywhere or just in the nose (yellow, a recessive trait, has no pigment except in the nose). And many other traits have even more genes involved. There are also new mutations. That would my guess for you - that brown eyes isn't recessive in your family, but a random mutation only you got. Most people have a couple of new mutations that occurred during conception, though usually they aren't noticeable. There are further complexities that researchers are only just discovering, such as imprinting - some genes are only turned on if you inherited them from a certain parent. For example the UBE3A gene on chromosome 15 is only active on the 15 inherited from the mother. Nonfunction of this gene causes Angelman Syndrome, a severe developmental disability with epilepsy and sleep problems. There are some people who have a mutation that renders UBE3A nonfunctional - if they inherited this mutation from the father they are fine, but if they inherited it from the mother they have Angelman Syndrome. Another complication is X-inactivation - in women, one X is mostly turned off in each cell (except for in the ovaries). Which X is turned off is randomly decided for each cell, so X-linked genes will be expressed in (usually) about half of a woman's cells. This is why only female cats are calicos or tortoiseshells, because the color of the blotches is determined by an X-linked gene. (Another gene determines white or dark background, and location of the blotches appears to be determined environmentally.) One allelle codes for orange, one for brown/black. Whether a given blotch is orange or brown is determined by which X was inactivated in the early cell that this particular patch of skin cells descend from. X-linked recessive traits are those where half the normal function is enough to give the same result - for example female carriers of hemophilia have lower clotting factor than normal people, but enough that they don't have bleeding problems. Can you tell genetics is one of my big obsessions?
This has been really interesting. My input? Amber eyes look cool. This has been particularly good for me, as I was considering having a race with mainly yellow-green eyes.
After some inspecting, I realizes my dad is one of those lucky people to have amber eyes. Everyone in his family has green yes, and he was the only one with dark brown eyes. Sometime in his teen years, they started to lighten up to the yellow/gold/green color they are today.
I had to research eye color for a story I was writing, and came across pretty much the same information that Amber and Ettina had mentioned. It has more to do with the amount of melanin as well as other complexities that determines the eye color. Just because one of the parent has brown eyes, doesn't mean the child will automatically have brown eyes. I can attest to this in my own family. I have brown eyes. My daughter has the same blue/green eyes as her father (they change color depending on light and what color top she is wearing).
