Is it possible to have eyes of two different colors? I scoffed when I heard this at work recently, but others said it happens all the time, and one guy even claimed to know a woman who was “bi” (colored, that is). Are these people imagining things, or is it just that I’m a wuss who never looks people in the eye? –John O’Keefe, Westchester, Illinois
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I have an ophthalmological mystery for you to unravel. I was born with hazel eyes (it’s on my birth certificate), that is, a muddy mix of green and brown. About two to four years ago, around age 31, they changed fairly quickly to light blue or blue gray (depending on the light). I don’t know exactly when it happened because I only found out when my girlfriend pointed it out to me. I told her she was nuts, of course, but checked in the mirror and she was right. No one has been able to explain this phenomenon to me, least of all my optometrist. My fraternal twin brother, however, forwarded me a biomedical journal article which described an adult change in eye color occurring in about 10 percent of the population. The study involved twins whose eye color was rated annually or so on a scale of 1 to 15, or blue to brown. None of the subjects had a change higher than three units, and a change of two units was typical among those whose eye color changed. Clearly my situation is different, since my color change must be near 15 units. Do you have any explanation or corroboration of this?
Here’s what we know:
(5) On the other hand–if, honest to God, your eyes shifted from hazel (medium brown) to light blue, that’s a radical depigmentation, maybe not 15 on the Louisville scale but possibly 7 or 8. When doctors see something like that they wonder, What other parts of this guy’s body are about to fall off? You didn’t say anything about blurry vision or eye irritation, which pretty much rules out Fuchs’s heterochromia, and you’re a little young for senile iris atrophy. I see some discussion here with words like “blastoma” in it…nah, can’t be. Sorry. Forget I even brought it up.
