Opinion: The eyes have it

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The Times’ oped page ran a compelling article today questioning an offer by the Los Angeles-based Fertility Institutes to allow prospective parents to choose the ‘eye color, hair color and complexion’ of their offspring. Using in vitro fertilization technology to ensure that your kids look like ‘The Boys from Brazil’ is pretty creepy. But what struck me about the pitch for designer babies was the priority given eye color.

I have struggled for years to understand why the color of someone’s eyes -- especially if it’s blue -- looms so large in journalism, fiction and poetry. Sometimes blue eyes are a synonym for ‘Caucasian,’ as in ‘blue-eyed soul.’ More often, blue eyes are pulled out of the feature writer’s tool box (a disturbing image) to tug at the heartstrings of readers....

Consider this quotation from a 2007 feature story in the South Bend, Ind., Tribune: ‘When the American Girl doll company goes looking for a new character, they should turn their eyes to Plymouth. If Zoë Keilman’s strawberry hair, blue eyes and freckles aren’t enough, hear her loud fearless voice discussing cancer and its effects on her family.’ If Zoë’s eyes were brown and her hair dishwater dull, would those details have made it into the story? (And what if her voice were soft and cowardly?)

Likewise, a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes a benefactor of special-needs kids this way: ‘He’s an affable man with sandy hair and blue eyes that twinkle when he describes the joy his young charges display at play [and] tear while recounting an occasion when he helped grant a child’s last wish.’

Forget eye color for a minute, and think of all the news stories and novels you’ve read in which someone’s eyes are described as twinkling. In a career in which I have interviewed hundreds of people, I have never seen anyone’s eyes -- blue, green or brown -- twinkle. Indeed, I’m not sure that most reporters notice anything about people’s eyes unless they’re desperate for a descriptive detail. As I write this, I am unable to tell you the eye color of any of the colleagues who sit near me.

My indifference to eye color may reflect the fact that I have trouble describing my own. My father had light blue eyes, my mother dark brown, but my brother and I have what Dad called ‘eye-colored eyes’ -- grayish-greenish irises with faint flecks of brown and a barely discernible blue corona. If eyes are windows on the soul, mine are stained-glass windows, but after the sun has gone down. I used to tell people that they were hazel, but when I sat for my official LA Times photograph I was told that they actually were blue-green. (Sorry, I don’t see it.)

Whatever the accurate description, I doubt many clients of the Fertility Institutes will want their babies to have eyes like mine, even if they twinkled.