How Your Eyes Influence the Way Others See You

Your eyes are a subtle but influential part of the impression you make on others. Eye movements can be powerful nonverbal cues that affect others and carry meaning for how others view you.

Here are some ways that your eyes are involved in nonverbal communication:

1. Eye-to-eye contact causes arousal. Staring directly into someone’s eyes causes an arousal reaction. How that arousal is interpreted, however, depends on the parties involved and the circumstances. Being stared at by a stranger who appears large or ominous can be seen as a threat and elicit a fear response. This is common in social animals: A direct stare from a human to a dog or an ape can be interpreted as a threat from the large (and strange) human. However, the gaze of a potential sexual partner causes arousal that can be interpreted positively—as a sexual invitation.

2. The eyes will tell you if a smile is real or not. Psychologist Paul Ekman has distinguished between smiles that represent genuine happiness (“Duchenne” smiles) and fake smiles that might be used to feign happiness, or cover some other emotion. The key to telling a fake smile from a real one is in the eyes. When forming real smiles, the eyes narrow and create lines, or “crow’s feet,” at the outer corners.

3. Pupil dilation is a sign of interest (and it can make you seem sexy). When we are interested in something or someone our pupils will dilate. In one study, a woman’s eyes were altered to make her pupils look dilated. The exact same photos of the woman with dilated eyes was rated as more attractive than those with normal-size pupils.

4. Eye color is related to how others perceive us. Although eye color is not associated with sexual attraction, men with darker eyes (brown) are seen as more dominant than light-eyed males. A number of studies have looked for personality differences based on eye color, but no consistent relationships have been found.

5. Eye color can change. Eye color is one of those seemingly permanent characteristics that define who we are and how we appear. Blue, brown, green, hazel, or gray—we assume that whatever eye color we are born with will remain our eye color throughout our life. However, research has shown that there are several ways that eye color can change over our lifespan.

Although eye color tends to be stable throughout adulthood, there are instances in which eye color can become notably lighter or darker with age. This is most visible in older people with blue eyes, as the pigment fades, and their eye color changes to a paler blue.

A physical injury, or an infection of the eye, can cause eye color to change. The most famous example of this was rock star David Bowie’s eyes. His right eye was blue, while his left eye was noticeably darker, appearing dark gray or brown depending on how the light hit it. The color change in his left eye was caused by a punch to the head he sustained as a youth. The injury caused the pupil to be permanently dilated. As a result, the contrast of the large pupil and smaller iris made his left eye appear darker than the right.

Although we may not be consciously aware of our eyes' influence, or of others', they may nonetheless exert an important psychological power.