Did you ever wonder why newborn babies have blue eyes? Or how human beings get the various eye colors we have? What pigment in our bodies gives us green or gray or brown eyes? The color of our eyes comes from melanin, the pigment that also colors our hair and skin. At birth, a baby's body isn't finished producing this pigment yet. Over the first year of life, as our eyes develop and our bodies produce more melanin, our irises gradually change from baby blue to their permanent color. So, what produces the color in green or hazel or brown or black eyes? Actually, despite the many different colors that our eyes can have, the color of the actual pigment in all of them is exactly the same. Melanin only comes in one shade, yellow-brown.