h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

With albino mice and rabbits, their eyes are very red. This is supposed to be because without the pigment, you can see the blood vessels behind the iris. Human albinos don´t seem to have red eyes however, but more very pale blue ones instead. Anyone know why this is, do they perhaps still have more pigment than an albino mouse?

Don't know the answer, but I've heard that the blue colour of babies' eyes is not caused by pigment. It is some sort of a diffraction/interference effect caused by the fibres in the eye. Perhaps this is the default state for the eyes before the pigment is added.

I'm not familiar with rabbit eyes - maybe the pupil is usually larger, hence you see mostly the light reflected from the retina.

Yes, human eyes without pigment are still blue because of light scattered by the fibres. Also I would think that you rarely see an albino with large pupils under normal lighting. Interestingly it is possible to be an ocular albino but still have normal coloured (fair) hair instead of white.

I've seen pictures of Connie Chiu that suggest that her eyes do indeed appear blue most of the time, under normal lighting, but pink when the pupil is fully expanded.

I had a Chinese student in HK with pink eyes. They were almost never visible because she wore wraparound sunglasses.
I imagine they normally don't live, because of the pain. My younger brother had white hair and blue eyes very,very sensitiive skin and I do n't think he was ever out of pain from the light.

I know one person who does have red or pink eyes, and I've seen others who also have.

I was just thinking about this again, any suggestions?

My suggestion is that the assumption in the question is incorrect - as I've said, I've only known one albino, who did indeed have red eyes. I've seen a couple of others, too. WS also mentioned a student with pink eyes.

So I think they do.

It appears when the DaVinci Code book was to be made into a movie, some albino groups were complaining when they at first intended to give Silas red eyes like in the book. Which according to them was wrong, as albino humans have pale blue eyes.

Really? Hmmm. Maybe the answer is that a small minority of them do, and that I've seen lots of other albinos and thought they were just people with really light fair hair...

I'd not heard of Connie Chiu before, I've just done a good image search and wow!

Yes the albinism is most obvious when you're dealing with someone not caucasian. I guess there's always the possibility that the red-eyed ones are the ones that tend to wear sunglasses as you say.

I used to know a girl with albinism at school, when I was about seven, and she definitely had red eyes - a source of endless delighted fascination to the rest of the class. If we begged, and she was feeling magnanimous, she'd take her sun-glasses off for a sec and let us look. And then we'd all get told off by the teachers because the LIGHT was DANGEROUS and we were being VERY SILLY and TAKING RISKS. I was therefore quite surprised to discover most people with albinism actually have pale blue eyes instead. I thought red was the norm.

I guess it might be a matter of how severe the albinism is then.

And in which direction light is shining.

I found this on Wikipedia:

"The human eye normally produces enough pigment to color the iris blue and lend opacity to the eye. However, there are cases in which the eyes of an albinistic person appear red or purple, depending on the amount of pigment present, due to the red of retina being visible through the iris. Lack of pigment in the eyes also results in problems with vision, both related and unrelated to photosensitivity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albinism