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These days, when it comes to your physical appearance, you can change just about anything that you’re not happy with. You can go to the gym and lose weight (or take weight-loss pills, though we don’t advise it), you can buy yourself a new nose or a new pair of breasts. You can tattoo a whole new set of eyebrows to your forehead. You can change the colour, texture and length of your hair with oodles of extensions and you can even wear permanent false lashes if you so desire. Transforming the world of beauty fixes as we know it, you can now also surgically change the colour of your peepers.
So, you were born with brown eyes but you fancy baby blues a la Kate Bosworth or Cameron Diaz? It’s no surprise that light blue eyes are highly sought after, given that only 17% of the world’s population have been gifted with such an eye colour. Well, if you start saving (it’s said to cost only 5000 Dollars), there’ll soon be a very real treatment for that.
PHD Biologist Gregg Homer stumbled upon this idea almost 20 years ago, as Mashable report, after a routine treatment for pigmentation at his own dermatologist. Would it be possible, he mused, to use laser surgery to a) change the colour of someone’s eyes and b) not damage their ability to see in the process? Yes and yes, apparently (though human trials are still under way in Costa Rica, the potential long-term side-effects are still unknown). Homer discovered that under every brown eye lies a base blue pigment. Homer theorised that altering the top layer of colour wouldn’t be such a stretch of the imagination, using the technology already designed to do away with pigmentation.
“If you take that pigment away, then the light can enter the stroma – the little fibers that look like bicycle spokes in a light eye – and when the light scatters it only reflects back the shortest wavelengths and that’s the blue end of the spectrum,” he?explained to Mashable.
37 trials so far have proved successful, though Homer won’t take the procedure public (wise man, Homer) until more thorough testing has been conducted; nobody wants to be the one unlucky guinea pig to walk away with a case of Glaucoma.
So it’ll be a while before you can opt in to this game-changing treatment, but would you do it? Though we might some day be partial to a nip here, a tuck there, isn’t the colour of our eyes an integral part of our identity? Are you that unhappy with your peepers that you’d?undergo a cosmetic change such as this? Or is it no big deal if we’re already living in a world where lipo-suction and botox is so prevalent?
In this writer’s humble opinion, brown eyes are pretty damn attractive – just look at Keira Knightley, Ashton Kutcher, Natalie Portman and listen to Van Morrison‘s hit song – but being born with blue ones, it seems we always want what we don’t have.
Over to you.