"I have seen Estefanía's baby, who says she will call you in case one day you want to go see her. How lucky they have been, she is very good and also beautiful, she has gray eyes."
This phrase, or similar, I have heard on more than one occasion. Even as a child I heard it from my mother, when my younger brother was born and she was happy because I saw the eyes of a beautiful gray color. Why do babies have gray eyes?
Couldn't they be born with their eye color?
Because of course, if they were born with the color of the eyes because they would avoid arguments, hypotheses and riddles of the style "it has gray, but that means that it will have brown" or "already, but gray with a clear halo around the pupil, and then it means that you will be clear. "
But no, babies are born with gray eyes, most, although many babies already have some color and we, the parents, have to listen to these absurd family discussions in which the mother's family says she will have eyes like those of his family and that of the father who will have them as his own.
Why are they born with gray eyes?
For the same reason that a child's hair is one color and when they are older it may have changed, due to the action or inaction of melanin and the sun. Melanin is the substance responsible for giving color to the iris, which is the part that surrounds the pupil and that gives color to the eye. At first the cells that produce melanin are very immature and the production is totally insufficient to give color to the eyes, that's why they look gray.
As the days, weeks and months pass, melanin begins to give color to the eyes and little by little that color is defined more and more. At birth they have a color, at six months they can have a very different color and, although many people say that that is the final color, not at all. There is still a lot of time for what is finally known.
Nor do I say that it is a year, or that it is not, it is simply that melanin is still produced and that another agent comes into action that has a lot to say: Sun.
A few days ago we saw a video in which the effect of the sun on our skin was observed, as it changed its appearance and made children "freckle" and adult spots. Well, the sun, in our eyes, also causes changes and adaptations and the eyes change color. It does not happen a lifetime, of course, but I can say, for example, that my oldest son had one-color eyes at two years and now with eight he has the same color, but darker.
So a baby's eyes, gray or bluish, as a rule, say absolutely nothing and it's just a curiosity. A temporary curiosity because eventually they will not have gray.
