Recovering anatomical features of organic materials is a challenging issue. The human eye, as an important part of the non verbal communication, needs to be accurately modeled and rendered to increase the realism of virtual characters. The recent improvements of the graphics hardware offer the opportunity of rendering complex organic materials, following correct anatomical properties. We propose a novel method that allows to recover the iris structure and scattering features from a single eye photograph. In this aim, we developed a method to unrefract iris photographs. We model the iris using the Subsurface Texture Mapping representation which allows to describe the relieves of the human iris. Finally, we introduce a refraction function for accurate real-time rendering of the eye, accounting for the refraction of the light at the corneal interface.