# eye colour?



## poolann

Technically I think poos are supposed to have dark eyes. The exception may be the browns or brown variations where I personally have seen lighter eyes but I'm not sure if it is again technically correct. I'm sure that some lines have the potential to produce lighter or even blue eyes. 

When I first started asking Racer for eye contact it was hard to tell if he was actually looking at me. I would have to look for a little line of white at the bottom to know was looking up lol. He has a very dark also known as "dead" eye. Trust me they don't actually look dead. There is usually a mischievous twinkle there. 
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## star

Thank you for the reply I had never seen blue eyes in a poodle before


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## cowpony

When I brought my black and white boy Pogo home at 9 weeks he still had a blue haze to his eyes. His eyes later darkened to almost black. One of my friends has a black and white poodle with amber eyes. I know amber is considered undesirable in black dogs, but I like it better than Pogo's very dark eyes. The light eyes stand out more, and I can see the expression better. Pogo's eyes just blend in with his fur. 

I'd be a little worried about a parti poodle with ice blue eyes. Maybe the dog just has an eye color mutation; no big deal if so. The dog might have a spontaneous mutation, or a blue eyed Aussie might have jumped the fence a few generations back. Either way it's no problem from a health perspective. (Although not so great from a breed standard perspective.)

It's more of a problem if the blue eyes resulted from a mutation affecting neural crest cell migration. As an embryo develops, cells move out from the neural crest and specialize into different things. Some of these cells are involved with pigment production in the skin. Others are involved with the development of bones in the face, nerve cells, and smooth muscles.

In the best circumstances, the neural crest cell mutation did nothing more than mess up pigment distribution in the skin - white spots or merle markings. In more severe circumstances other important body functions got affected too. Blindness, deafness, facial abnormalities, intestinal problems, etc would result. That's why deafness is often associated with blue eyes and white facial markings in animals, and the lethal white gene runs with frame overo markings in horses. 

So, my concern in seeing a blue eyed parti-poodle pup is that the unusual color could be a sign of something more than just a cosmetic mutation.


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## Jacknic

star said:


> I'm curious about poodle eye colour. I saw a white with black parti poodle at the pet shop that had blue/grey eyes. It was under 3 months of age if that makes a difference. Just curious if maybe it wasn't a purebred? Do certain colours of poodles have specific eye colour? Hope this isn't a stupid question!


It could be determined by age, but it is also possible that the puppy had a merle colored poodle somewhere in it's heritage. There is a lot of controversy about the color, but it is not in poodle history and it is a dominate gene, so would be impossible to "hide" the gene. The merle gene produces blue eyes. Black, blue white and silver most reds and apricots should have black eyes, brown and apricot can have dark brown to amber eyes, with parti's the eye color should coordinate with the darkest color on their body.


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