Summary: Fermion mixing is generally believed to be a low-energy manifestation of an underlying theory whose energy scale is much larger than the electroweak scale. In this paper we investigate the possibility that the parameters describing lepton mixing actually arise from the low-energy behavior of the neutrino interacting fields. In particular, we conjecture that the measured value of the mixing angles for a given process depends on the number of unobservable flavor states at the energy of the process. We provide a covariant implementation of such conjecture, draw its consequences in a two-neutrino family approximation and compare these findings with current experimental data. Finally we show that this infrared origin of mixing will be manifest at the Ice Cube DeepCore array, which measures atmospheric oscillations at energies much larger than the tau lepton mass; it will hence be experimentally tested in a short time scale.