Bright, clear eyes often give the impression of youth, energy, and health. Red or yellowish eyes may suggest tiredness or illness. Blue eyes are often romanticized in films, paintings, and popular culture. And the “white of the eye” is usually assumed to be most attractive when it is as white and clear as possible. But in our recent research, we found that the story is not quite that simple.
In our study, we examined this question across a large and diverse set of faces. We studied more than 1,000 faces from several culturally distinct populations and measured subtle differences in the eye region. We looked at the colour of the iris, but also the colour of the visible tissue around the iris, often called the white of the eye or sclera. More technically, this visible area is part of the peri-iridial tissue.
We then examined whether these eye features predicted ratings of attractiveness, femininity, and masculinity. The raters judged faces from their own populations. This matters because people are usually most familiar with the range of faces they see around them. What looks normal, attractive, or unusual may depend partly on local facial variation and cultural experience.
One of the most important findings of our study was that eye colouration seemed to matter more for women’s faces than for men’s faces. In women, slightly darker eye whites were linked to higher perceived femininity. And because more feminine female faces were also rated as more attractive, this suggests that the colour of the eye area may influence attractiveness partly by changing how feminine a face appears. In other words, when it comes to the eyes, lighter is not always better. So the eye area may affect attractiveness not only by making a face look healthy or unhealthy, but also by making it look more or less feminine.
For men’s faces, the pattern was weaker. Eye colouration did not strongly or consistently predict attractiveness or masculinity. This suggests that the colour of the eye region may play a clearer role in judgments of female attractiveness and femininity than in judgments of male attractiveness and masculinity.
This does not mean that unhealthy-looking eyes are attractive. That would be the wrong conclusion. Red, yellowish, irritated, or tired-looking eyes can still give negative impressions. Rather, the point is that the relationship between eye colouration and attractiveness is more subtle than people often assume. The most attractive or feminine appearance may not come from maximum whiteness, but from a more natural balance.
The Iris Tells a Different Story
The iris, or the coloured part of the eye, showed a somewhat different pattern from the eye whites. Across the whole sample, women with less yellow sclera or bluer irises tended to be rated as more attractive. But when we looked at the individual populations, this pattern was not equally strong everywhere. The clearest evidence appeared in the Turkish and Czech female samples, where bluer irises were associated with higher attractiveness.
These cultural differences are important. In the Turkish sample, there was relatively large variation in iris lightness, including some blue-eyed women. In the Colombian sample, there was also substantial iris-colour variation, likely reflecting the population’s mixed European, Indigenous, African, and mestizo ancestry.
By contrast, in the Vietnamese, Iranian, and Cameroonian samples, iris colour was mostly within the brown range, with little or no blue, green, or hazel variation. In India, there was some variation, but irises were still generally very dark. In these samples, the effect of lighter or bluer irises was weaker or less certain.
So, while iris colour may influence attractiveness, it does not work as a universal beauty rule. Blue eyes are often romanticized in popular culture as rare, beautiful, mysterious, or especially desirable. But our findings suggest a more nuanced picture: iris colour matters most where there is enough local variation for it to become socially noticeable.
This is different from the finding about the white of the eye. The iris finding concerns the coloured part of the eye. The sclera or peri-iridial finding concerns the visible tissue around the iris. Both are part of the eye region, but they seem to contribute to first impressions in different ways.
Beauty Is Not One Feature
People often want simple rules: blue eyes are attractive, white sclera are attractive, symmetry is attractive, feminine female faces and masculine male faces are attractive. But real facial perception is more complicated. The brain does not judge each feature separately and then add them up. It reads the face as a whole. This is why cross-cultural research matters. Human beings share many basic perceptual tendencies, but we also learn from the faces around us. Familiarity, culture, environment, and local variation all shape what looks normal, attractive, or unusual.
Author note: My forthcoming book, The Psychology of Attractiveness and Aesthetics: How We Perceive Beauty in People and Artwork, explores the science of beauty, attraction, and aesthetics: why we are drawn to certain faces, bodies, artworks, patterns, and designs, and how psychology, biology, culture, and the brain shape these preferences.
