The eyes have it - research

Can you trust these blue eyes? Photo / Getty Images

If you have blue eyes, this could make you a bit green.

Men and women with brown eyes are seen as more trustworthy.

But before blue-eyed boys and girls reach for coloured contact lenses, the results may simply be to do with the facial shape of those with brown eyes.

Researchers took pictures of 80 men and women and asked almost 250 volunteers to rate them.

Overall, brown-eyed faces were judged to be more trustworthy than the blue-eyed ones and the women as more trustworthy than the men.

Faces that were rated as attractive were also seen to be trustworthy, science journal PLoS ONE reports.

Women with brown eyes marked pictures of blue-eyed females lower than those whose eyes were green or brown.

And in a show of blatant eye-colour bias, those ladies with brown eyes rated brown-eyed female faces more highly than blue-eyed ones. The colour of the eyes on the pictures were then changed, to see if this affected perceptions.

For male participants the change did not make a difference, suggesting there is something about the shape of brown-eyed faces that conveys honesty.

Photos of men with brown eyes tended to have bigger eyes, noses and broader chins. Smaller facial features may lead to a man being perceived as less masculine, and so less trustworthy, the researchers, from Charles University, in Prague, said.

- DAILY MAIL