This Surgery Permanently Changes a Person's Eye Color
It's called cosmetic keratopigmentation, and it's causing quite a controversy.
Hiya!
My dad had brown eyes, and my mom has blue eyes, but I have green eyes that I’ve received compliments on for as long as I can remember. Not just people I’ve met, but strangers on the street will stop to comment on the color of my eyes.
I typically respond with “thanks, I grew them myself,” since, unlike our fitness level or fashion choices, our eye color remains largely unchanged throughout our lives, and we have no control over which color we’re born with.
However, that may not be the case anymore. Now there’s a relatively new surgery that, for a few thousand dollars, will permanently alter a person’s eye color — and it’s growing in popularity worldwide.
How Eye Color Forms
Let's discuss our natural eye colors before I tell you about the surgery. When we talk about the color of someone’s eyes, we’re referring to the color of their irises. Each eye has an iris, made of a two-layered ring of muscle tissue that surrounds the pupil and helps control how much light enters our eyes.
The color of our irises depends on several factors, including genetics, but the main element that determines the color is a pigment called melanin. Many people associate melanin with skin color, as the more melanin a person has, the darker their skin tone is.
However, melanin works a little differently in our eyes, as the color of our irises depends not just on how much melanin we have, but also on how it’s distributed between the two layers of our irises.
Everyone, except some people who have conditions like albinism, has melanin in the back layer of each iris, but the front layer has more variation.
People with brown eyes have a lot of melanin in both layers of their irises, the front and back. Meanwhile, people with green or hazel eyes have less melanin in the front layer of their irises than people with brown eyes, and people with blue or grey eyes have irises with little to no melanin in their front layers.
The various combinations of melanin between the two iris layers result in just a handful of primary eye colors — including brown, amber, hazel, green, blue, and grey — but there are infinite ways and shades the colors can present.
Over half of the human population (some estimate as much as 80 percent) has brown eyes, making it the most common eye color. Part of the reason brown eyes are so prevalent is that the category includes a spectrum of shades ranging from a lighter, almost honey coloring to brown so dark it’s challenging to tell where the iris ends and the pupil begins.
There’s also a theory that all humans had brown eyes until about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, when someone was born with a mutation to a gene called HERC2, which acts as a sort of dimmer for another gene called OCA2.
This person's HERC2 gene mutation decreased the amount of melanin the OCA2 produced in their irises, making their eyes appear blue. Further, it’s believed all people with blue eyes descend from this person.
Today, it’s estimated that about 10 percent of living people have blue eyes, making it a distant second most common human eye color. Hazel and amber are tied for third place, with about 5 percent of the population having each.
Meanwhile, only about 2 percent of people worldwide have green eyes, making it the rarest of the typical eye colors. I gotta say, after I learned this fact, all the comments I’ve received about my eyes made a lot more sense.
Still, despite having the rarest eye color, I’ve always wondered what I’d look like with blue or brown eyes, but for some people, it’s more than a curiosity.
Eye Color Alterations
As visual animals, we value what we perceive as visually appealing, or beautiful. With an ingrained desire for self-expression, we want to be considered beautiful, too, and we’ve created entire, multi-billion-dollar industries dedicated to it.
We want the “ideal” body proportions and height, hair color, skin tone, and complexion, and we invent ways to alter our natural appearance to achieve them. So, I suppose it’s no surprise we’d also find ways to change the color of our irises, which became quite the popular goal in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
I remember when colored contacts became mainstream. My high school was full of students wearing ones that made their irises look red, blue, purple, and black. Some even had designs, such as an eight-ball or flames.
However, beyond my high school, people who wanted a more permanent transformation could turn to an invasive, unregulated, and dangerous operation at the time known as iris implantation. Unfortunately, this procedure routinely causes complications, including cataracts, chronic inflammation, glaucoma, and vision loss.
Around the same time, another unregulated operation called keratopigmentation, which involves surgeons injecting dye into the iris, began taking off.
Keratopigmentation started as a medical treatment for people with conditions like aniridia, which occurs when someone is born without or with missing parts of their irises.
Since our irises control the amount of light that enters our eyes, impairments of our irises can result in severe visual glare that can make activities during the day, like driving, difficult or even painful. The dye injected into the iris by the surgeon helps fill in the missing part of a person’s iris to help reduce the excessive light.
Roberto Pineda, a corneal specialist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, began performing medical keratopigmentation in the late 1990s. He told Saima S. Iqbal of Scientific American that the reported side effects of the procedure are limited but can include pigment fading and, in rare circumstances, spreading.
Considering the low side effects, by the early 2000s, people started seeing further potential for medical keratopigmentation — cosmetic keratopigmentation.