What Is the Evil Eye?

The evil eye is one of those symbols almost everyone recognizes and plenty of people misname. The blue-and-white eye seen on bracelets, doorways and key rings isn’t supposed to be the curse. It’s supposed to protect you from it.

In folklore, the evil eye is a harmful gaze believed to bring bad luck, illness, loss or some other sudden misfortune. Envy is usually what gives the look its power, although the person casting it doesn’t always have to mean any harm. In some traditions, admiring a baby, a new home or someone’s good fortune too openly is enough to cause concern.

There isn’t one single evil-eye tradition either. You’ll find versions of the belief across the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, Britain, South Asia and the Americas, and the details can be very different from one place to another. Some people wear an eye-shaped bead. Others use a hand, a horn, red thread, prayer, spitting, oil, water or a spoken charm. What keeps appearing is the same uncomfortable idea that too much attention, especially envious attention, can put something good at risk.

So what does it mean to give someone the evil eye?

If someone “gives you the evil eye” in everyday English, it usually just means they’ve given you a nasty look. The older superstition goes much further than that. The look itself is supposed to have the power to cause harm.

In some versions, you’d have good reason to be suspicious of the person staring at you because jealousy or resentment is what makes the gaze dangerous. In others, intention barely matters. Someone could genuinely admire your new house, compliment your child or be impressed by your success and still cause the evil eye without meaning to.

That’s why babies, newlyweds, successful people, healthy animals and valuable possessions turn up so often in the folklore. They’re things people notice. If you have something particularly desirable, the superstition says you also have something other people can envy.

It also explains why praise can become strangely complicated. In some families and cultures, you don’t just tell someone their baby is beautiful and leave it at that. You touch the child, say a protective phrase, make a spitting sound or follow the compliment with another small ritual, just in case all that admiration attracts the wrong sort of attention.

The belief is thousands of years old

If you’ve mostly seen the evil eye on modern jewellery, it’s easy to assume the superstition belongs to the same world as crystal bracelets and contemporary spiritual symbols. It doesn’t. People were worrying about dangerous looks thousands of years ago.

Some of the earliest surviving evidence comes from ancient Mesopotamia. The Louvre holds a Mesopotamian tablet describing the effects of the evil eye, dated to the second millennium BCE. So the belief was already around long before the blue glass eye we recognise today.

It was well established in the ancient Greek world too. Eye designs appeared on drinking vessels, and at least some of them have been interpreted as protective. The Science Museum Group has a Greek drinking cup from around 451–400 BCE with large painted eyes that were intended to ward off the evil eye.

The Romans had their own ideas about protection, although their charms could be rather more eye-catching than the jewellery you’d wear today. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a first-century Roman bronze amulet combining several symbols, including a phallus and the mano fica hand gesture. The museum describes them as protective devices used to ward off the evil eye.

There probably isn’t going to be one tidy answer to the question of who “invented” the evil eye. The evidence is too old and too widespread for that. What we can see is that fear of harmful looking was already firmly established in the ancient world and then continued in different forms for centuries.

Why is envy such a big part of it?

Envy makes sense of a lot of the superstition. Imagine that everything is going unusually well for you. You’ve had a healthy baby, your business is thriving, you’ve bought something expensive or your family seems particularly fortunate. That’s exactly when, according to evil-eye folklore, you should be careful about who notices.

The fear isn’t always that someone is plotting against you. It can be much subtler. They want what you have, they admire it a little too much or their compliment carries a trace of jealousy. In some traditions, that’s enough.

This also helps explain an idea you’ll see in a lot of old superstitions, such as talking too confidently about good fortune can feel risky. It isn’t all that far removed from knocking on wood after saying something you don’t want to jinx. The ritual is different, but the worry is familiar. You’ve drawn attention to something good, so now you do something to make sure you haven’t tempted trouble.

The blue eye is protection, not the curse

This is the part most likely to cause confusion today. Search for an evil-eye necklace and you’ll be shown an eye. Buy an “evil eye charm” and you’ll receive the same thing. That makes it sound as though you’re wearing the evil eye around your neck.

Traditionally, the eye-shaped amulet is doing the opposite. It’s looking back at the harmful gaze and protecting you from it.

The version you probably know best is the Turkish nazar boncuğu, usually made from glass with circles of dark blue, white and lighter blue. You’ll see them on jewellery, hanging in homes, attached to cars and sometimes pinned to children’s belongings.

You’ll also see modern shops selling evil-eye charms in every colour imaginable, with claims that green means success, purple means imagination, red means courage and so on. It’s worth being cautious with those lists. There isn’t one ancient international colour code for evil-eye beads. A lot of those precise colour meanings are much newer than the superstition itself.

In Greece, you’ll hear it called the mati

In Greece, the evil eye is commonly known as the mati, which means “eye.” Blue eye charms are easy to spot, but the tradition doesn’t stop with jewellery.

One custom you might come across after someone compliments a baby or another person is a spitting sound, often written as “ftou, ftou, ftou.” Nobody is necessarily actually spitting on you. The sound is used protectively, as a way of stopping admiration from turning into something harmful.

There are also prayers and family rituals for dealing with the mati. Some are taught privately and aren’t performed in exactly the same way from one household to another.

It would be too easy to say that every Greek custom you see today has survived untouched from ancient Greece. Folklore changes constantly. But the fear behind it certainly has deep roots there, and ancient Greek objects show that people were already using eyes as protection more than two thousand years ago.

Britain had an evil eye too

If you grew up in Britain, the evil eye might sound more Mediterranean than British. Historically, though, Britain had plenty of its own beliefs about dangerous looks. They just weren’t usually represented by the blue-and-white bead you see today.

In older British folklore, the evil eye often overlapped with fears about witchcraft. Someone suspected of having unusual powers could supposedly “overlook” a person, child or animal and make them ill. A run of bad luck, sick livestock or a child suddenly becoming unwell could all be blamed on someone thought to possess a harmful gaze.

Nineteenth-century folklore collections from northern England and the Scottish Borders record beliefs about the evil eye alongside charms used to protect people from witches. And the belief didn’t disappear as soon as the Victorian period ended.

The Science Museum Group has an agate amulet collected in Devon and dated to 1901–1911. The brown-and-white stone naturally looks rather like an eye, and fishermen carried stones like this to protect themselves from the evil eye.

So this isn’t a case of modern Britain borrowing the symbol after everyone started bringing nazar bracelets home from holiday. A fisherman in Devon could be carrying his own evil-eye protection more than a century ago, even though his charm looked completely different.

Scotland had its own evil-eye charms

Scottish Gaelic folklore gives us some particularly good examples. The Gaelic term droch shùil means “evil eye,” and stories and charms connected with it were still being collected in the early twentieth century.

One story preserved by the University of Edinburgh was collected in 1909 under the title “Droch Shuil”. A mare collapses after a visitor leaves. The visitor is brought back, walks around the animal reciting a charm and the mare gets up again and returns to ploughing.

The same archive preserves instructions connected with evil-eye charms, including what should be done with water left after a cure. That gives you a much clearer picture of how the superstition worked in everyday life. The evil eye wasn’t just something that happened to people. It could supposedly affect the horse you relied on for work or the livestock your household depended on.

Italy has the malocchio

In Italy, you’ll usually hear the evil eye called malocchio, literally the “bad eye.” Again, there’s no single Italian version because customs differ between regions and families.

One of the best-known forms of protection is the corno or cornicello, the long curved horn you’ll often see made in red coral or a red coral-like material. There are also protective hand gestures, prayers and family rituals used to diagnose or remove the malocchio.

And if you’ve seen a red Italian horn hanging from a rear-view mirror in Canada or the United States, there’s a reason for that. These traditions travelled with Italian families and became part of North American folklore too.

The evil eye in the United States

There isn’t an “American evil eye” with one set of rules. What you find instead is a country full of different versions carried by families from Italy, Greece, Mexico, the Middle East and elsewhere. Some stayed close to the traditions people knew before emigrating. Others changed as children and grandchildren kept parts of the custom and dropped others.

There’s a brilliant example of this in the Library of Congress. In Rhode Island in 1979, folklorists photographed an Italian-American woman demonstrating how her family removed the malocchio.

She made the sign of the cross over a spoon of olive oil and a bowl of water while saying a silent prayer and naming the person suspected of having the evil eye. She then dropped oil into the water. If the oil dispersed instead of remaining as separate drops on the surface, that was taken as evidence that the person named had malocchio. The ritual was repeated three times to remove it.

What makes records like this so useful is that they take the evil eye out of ancient history books and put it back into an ordinary family setting. This was Rhode Island in 1979, not ancient Rome.

Canada has its own surviving traditions

You find the same pattern in Canada. There isn’t one Canadian version of the evil eye, but the belief has been recorded within communities that brought their own traditions with them and continued them here.

Sicilian-Canadian belief is particularly well documented. Anthropologist Sam Migliore studied mal’uocchiu among Sicilian-Canadian communities in southern Ontario, looking at how the evil eye was understood within everyday family life and how it could be used to explain illness, distress and misfortune.

He later explored the tradition in much greater depth in Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress, published by the University of Toronto Press. His work is especially useful because it looks at a living Canadian tradition rather than treating the evil eye as something belonging only to ancient history or the Mediterranean.

Newfoundland’s folklore archives preserve another clue that evil-eye beliefs weren’t restricted to one immigrant community. Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Folklore and Language Archive includes material catalogued specifically as a “charm against evil eye” within its collections of Newfoundland witchcraft and folk belief.

So if you’ve come across an evil-eye tradition in a Canadian family, it doesn’t necessarily mean everyone around them shared it. Canada is a good example of how several different folk traditions can exist alongside one another, sometimes staying strong within a family long after the original move from another country.

Mal de ojo in Mexico and Mexican-American families

In Mexico, the evil eye is commonly known as mal de ojo. Babies and young children are especially important in some versions of the belief because they’re easy to admire and are seen as particularly vulnerable to unwanted attention.

You might hear that if you admire a baby, you should touch them as well so your praise doesn’t cause mal de ojo. A child who becomes unusually restless, feverish or difficult to settle might traditionally be suspected of having received it.

Protective red bracelets are common in some families, sometimes with beads, an eye or a religious medal attached. Cleansing rituals can also be used. One of the best known involves passing an egg over the person before breaking it into water, where its appearance is then interpreted.

You’ll find these beliefs north of the border too. Mexican-American folklore in Texas, New Mexico, California and elsewhere has carried mal de ojo traditions into the United States, sometimes with the same remedies and sometimes in forms that have changed over generations.

It’s worth remembering that “Latin American evil eye” is far too broad to be treated as one thing. Mexico has regional and family differences of its own, and traditions in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central America and South America don’t automatically follow exactly the same rules.

The hamsa doesn’t have to contain an eye

Another symbol you’ve probably seen is the hamsa, the open hand that sometimes has an eye sitting in its palm. The hand itself is older and more important to the symbol than that eye, and not every hamsa includes one.

Hamsa amulets have been used by both Jewish and Muslim communities in the Middle East and North Africa. The British Museum has a hand-shaped pendant from Gaza, made in the early twentieth century, that was used against the “evil eye” or “eye of envy.”

You’ll hear the symbol called the Hand of Fatima in Muslim contexts and the Hand of Miriam in Jewish ones. The Union for Reform Judaism explains that the hamsa has historically been used by both Jews and Muslims in Arab countries as protection against harmful forces, particularly the evil eye.

The name is connected with the Arabic word for five and the five fingers of the hand. Five has picked up plenty of symbolism outside the hamsa as well, which you can read about in the meaning of the number 5.

South Asia has its own nazar traditions

If you hear the word nazar, don’t assume someone is necessarily talking about the Turkish blue bead. The word is also widely used in South Asia for beliefs surrounding an envious or harmful gaze, and the protection can look completely different.

In some families, a black mark is placed on a baby or child to stop them attracting too much admiration. Protective objects can also be placed on homes, businesses and vehicles. You might even see something deliberately unattractive added to an otherwise beautiful object, with the idea that perfection attracts attention and attention attracts envy.

Clothing can be protective too. The Victoria and Albert Museum explains that among some communities in northwestern India, mirrorwork embroidery has been regarded as a way of warding off the evil eye, with the reflective pieces turning bad luck or harmful forces away from the wearer.

That doesn’t mean an Indian mirror, a Turkish eye bead, an Italian horn and a Middle Eastern hamsa are interchangeable. They come from different traditions. What connects them is the belief that there are ways to defend yourself against harmful attention.

What is supposed to happen if you get the evil eye?

This is where the answers become very broad. Depending on the tradition, the evil eye has been blamed for headaches, tiredness, nausea, crying babies, fever, accidents, sick animals, broken possessions, business problems and sudden runs of bad luck.

There isn’t one symptom that tells you, according to folklore, that someone has given you the eye. In fact, almost any unexplained downturn could potentially be fitted into the belief. Things were going well, somebody admired or envied what you had, and then something went wrong.

The remedy depends entirely on the tradition you’ve grown up with. It could involve prayer, an amulet, red thread, olive oil and water, an egg cleansing, spitting, a hand gesture or a spoken charm. In some families, the person who knows how to remove the eye is taught the ritual privately by an older relative.

There’s no scientific evidence that another person’s gaze can cause illness or misfortune in this way. If you’re actually unwell, the symptoms need an ordinary medical explanation rather than being assumed to come from the evil eye. The rituals belong to folklore, religious tradition and folk healing.

Can you give someone the evil eye by accident?

According to some of the best-known versions, yes. You don’t necessarily have to glare at someone while secretly hoping everything goes wrong for them.

Too much admiration can be enough. As already mentioned, you praise someone’s new baby, admire their house or talk enthusiastically about how lucky they are, and that attention is treated as risky even if you meant every word kindly.

Other traditions put much more emphasis on genuine envy or resentment, so there isn’t one rule that works everywhere. That’s worth keeping in mind whenever you see an article claiming to tell you exactly how the evil eye “works.” A Sicilian grandmother, a Greek family, a Mexican household and someone using a hamsa in North Africa don’t necessarily have the same explanation.

What does it mean if an evil-eye bracelet breaks?

A very popular belief today says that if your evil-eye bracelet suddenly snaps or the bead cracks, it has absorbed the harmful energy that was meant for you. In that version, the bracelet hasn’t failed. It has done its job.

You’ll see that explanation everywhere online, but it shouldn’t be presented as one ancient rule shared by every culture that uses evil-eye protection. Traditions around broken charms differ, and some of the very specific claims attached to modern evil-eye jewellery are much newer than the underlying superstition.

And, of course, there’s also the much less mysterious possibility that the elastic wore out.

Why do people still wear the evil eye today?

For some, wearing an evil-eye charm still means exactly what it would have meant to an older relative, and that is protection. It can be tied to religion, family, culture or a genuine belief that envy can bring trouble.

For someone else, it’s a family habit they’ve kept without thinking too hard about whether they believe it. And for plenty of people now, it’s jewellery. They like the design and might know very little about the superstition behind it.

That’s probably why the symbol can feel both ancient and completely modern at the same time. You can find it in museum collections thousands of years removed from us, in family rituals recorded in twentieth-century Rhode Island, and on a bracelet being sold today.

But wherever you see that blue-and-white eye, remember the distinction that gets mixed up so often. The charm isn’t supposed to be cursing you. It’s the thing standing between you and the look that supposedly can.

You can explore more beliefs, protective customs and traditional signs in Superstitions and Omens.