You’ve probably seen it in cartoons and animated movies. A close-up shot of a character’s pupils dilating when they saw food they liked or even got scared. It turns out that this can happen when you’re in love, too. According to optometrist Dr. Masoud Nafey (via VSP Vision Care), your eyes will react in a similar fashion to when you see a tiger or your favorite burger as it does when you’re falling for someone. “There’s a physiological response when somebody gets overly excited. Their pupils dilate. It’s called mydriasis. And that can happen if somebody is in love.”
Remember the TikTok pupil test from a while ago? People were asked to film the reaction in their eyes (more specifically, their pupils) while thinking of someone they fancied. If your eyes are dilated in the video, that means you are in love with the person you were thinking about. Commenting on this trend, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher shared (via WHYY), “What’s going on is that when you’re thinking about somebody that you are in love with, that’s triggering activity of feelings in the limbic system in the middle of the head, that’s sending signals up to the hypothalamus, pumps out norepinephrine and epinephrine or adrenaline [which] controls the iris muscle of the eye, and as that becomes activated, it pulls the pupil to become larger.”