The Réunion grey white-eye is very closely related.

They were formerly considered conspecific and together called Mascarene white-eye.

The Mauritius grey white-eye was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[1] Gmelin based his account on the "Figuier bleu" that had been described in 1778 by the French polymath, the Comte de Buffon, in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.

A hand-coloured engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet was published to accompany Buffon's text.