Jeepers, Creepers

A short while ago, I wrote about an AI professional portrait generated that turned the brown eyes of an Asian-American woman blue, presumably to make her look whiter and, hence, more professional.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my own eye color, which is blue. 

Maybe.

It may sound ridiculous to reach oldish age and not know exactly what color my eyes are, but there you have it.

For much of my life, when asked about my eye color, I always said blue. But they were never the beautiful, beautiful blue eyes that so many of family members and friends seemed to have been blessed with. Sky blue. Lake blue. Dark blue. Light blue. True blue. Blue blue. 

Mine were blue, alright.

After all, on my license it says BLU, so it's even official.

But that BLU is but pretty much 'Meh' blue. 

And it's changeable. If I wear blue, they're pretty much blue. If I wear black, they're gray. Teal sweater? Those eyes are greenish-blue. 

When I wore contacts, which I did from my late teens through 30 or so, I sometimes got the colored lenses to make my eyes seem bluer. 

Turning eyes bluer may well have been something of a mini-obsession, an obsession-een. 

As a little girl, I had a Ginnette doll, part of a Vogue Doll series made up of Ginny (the most popular), Ginnette (Ginny's baby sister), and Jill (Ginny's big sister, a more wholesome version of Barbie, pre-Barbie; my sister Kath had Jill). 

I liked Ginny, but I loved Ginnette, whom I called Netty. 

This isn't my Netty. (Most toys didn't survive childhood in the Rogers family, that's for sure. I still have Sniffy, the stuffed dog I got for my fourth birthday. Other than that...) But my Netty did have this adorable pink and grey snowsuit outfit. 

Anyway, in my cra little seven-year-old way, I decided that Netty's eyes were insufficiently blue. So I decided to play cosmetic ophthalmologist and, armed with a Magic Marker, I made her eyes bluer than blue. And, of course, managed to color in the whites of Netty's eyes, making her look like a zombie psycho baby.  

Fast forward six+ decades and, while I would never take a Magic Marker to my own baby meh blues, I do sit here wondering what color they actually are.

Sometimes, I've described my eyes as gray-blue, and that may be closer to the truth. When I googled gray-blue eye, I found this image, which seems pretty close to my eye color.

And it's apparently pretty rare. Only one-percent of Americans are estimated to have eyes this color peepers. Jeepers! (Always knew I was an oddball. Just more confirmation.)

Then there's that brownish-goldish ring around the iris. 

Yep, I got that, too.

Live and learn, and I've just learned that this is something called central heterochromia. Even rarer. Even more oddball, apparently. 

They're sometimes called sunflower eyes, which I prefer to central heterochromia.

Jeepers Creepers, where'd you get those sunflower peepers?

Who knows? It's supposedly not genetic, but my niece Caroline has it, too.

Sunflower eye? Who knew? Maybe my eye doctor. I'll be seeing him in a few weeks. I think I'll ask.