What Gives Skin, Hair, and Eyes Their Color?

Most of the natural color in your skin, hair, and eyes comes from melanin, a pigment your body makes. But the way melanin contributes to color is a little different in each one. In your skin, it helps create your skin tone. In your hair, it helps give you your natural blond, red, brown, or black color. And in your eyes, it plays a big part in whether your eyes are brown, blue, or green.

Your Skin Tone

Melanin in your skin is made by cells called melanocytes. Those cells make the pigment and pass it to nearby skin cells, where it becomes part of your skin tone.

Everyone has melanin in their skin, including people with very light skin. What differs is how much melanin is made, the type of melanin, and how it’s distributed. Those differences help create the range of skin tones we see.

Your skin can also change how much melanin it produces. Sun exposure can trigger more melanin production, which is why your skin may become darker after spending time in the sun. That’s the melanin behind a tan.

Hair Gets Its Color as It Grows

Your hair gets its color while it’s growing inside the follicle. Cells in the follicle make melanin and add it to the hair as it forms.

There are two types of melanin that help determine the color of your hair. Eumelanin gives hair more of its brown and black color, while pheomelanin gives it more yellow and reddish color. The amounts and mix of the two are what give you naturally black, brown, blond, or red hair.

This also helps explain why hair turns gray. As a follicle starts making less melanin, the new hair growing from it has less color. Eventually, a hair can grow in gray or white because little or no melanin is being added to it.

Eye Color Depends on Pigment and Light

Melanin is part of what gives your eyes their color. But it isn’t the only thing that affects the color you see. Light also affects how your iris looks, and the iris is the colored part of your eye.

Brown eyes generally have more melanin in the iris than blue eyes. But blue eyes don’t actually have blue pigment in them. They have less melanin, which allows light to scatter in a way that makes the iris look blue.

So the blue you see in someone’s eyes isn’t coming from blue melanin. It’s partly the way light behaves when there’s less melanin in the iris.

It All Comes Back to Melanin

Your genes play a big part in how much melanin your body makes, what types it makes, and how that melanin is used in your skin, hair, and eyes. Those genetic differences are part of why skin tone, hair color, and eye color vary so much from one person to another.

So melanin really is the short answer to what gives all three their color. The difference is in how that melanin works for each one.