Your eyesight isn’t worth $12,000—but social media would have you believe otherwise.
Scrolling through social media today, it’s hard to ignore videos of dramatic eye-colour transformations—brown to blue or green—tagged with #keratopigmentation. The procedure, that’s also referred to as ‘eye-tattooing’, is an eye surgery that was initially developed for medical use, designed to help patients cover up corneal scarring and injury.
According to a study published in The Scientific Journal of The Royal College of Ophthalmologists, there have been several documented instances of post-operative complications with corneal keratopigmentation, with one such instance reporting a complication rate of 12.82 per cent, of which 55 per cent were functional complications.
In recent months, however, the procedure has been repurposed by cosmetic clinics into a beauty trend, advertising it as a permanent alternative to coloured contact lenses.
The procedure involves using a needle or femtosecond laser that pulses to create space in the cornea, which is naturally crystal clear, then inserting a colour pigment to cover up the natural colour of the iris underneath. This not only permanently makes the cornea opaque but also brings with it a potential plethora of detrimental complications.
Despite being marketed as safe, comfortable, and effective, the procedure is causing ophthalmologists to sound the alarm, warning that the surgery could lead to irreversible eye damage, infections, and even blindness.
The handful of clinics offering the procedure primarily focus on social media platforms such as TikTok for marketing, charging as much as $12,000 for it. However, the procedure is neither approved by the Food and Drug Administration nor Health Canada, leaving patients with little to no regulatory protection.
On the other hand, some videos posted on TikTok have garnered millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes, patients swearing by the transformation and the procedure.
However, other medical professionals on TikTok don’t share the same sentiment. Vicki Chan, MD, an ophthalmologist, shared in a video posted on the app that the procedure was created to help make scarred eyes look more normal. She continued that seeing people use this on their functionally perfect, normal eyes made her “shudder”.
Among others, possible risks of the procedure are irreversible damage to the cornea, light sensitivity, infection, leakage of the dye into the surrounding parts of the eye, and even vision loss.
This raises questions about how intertwined social media is in our day-to-day lives. More importantly, it begs the question of why people are willing to risk their eyesight for beauty and what that says about our psychology as consumers when likes, views, and virality begin to affect our medical decisions.
A lack of sufficient long-term safety data, especially in purely cosmetic cases, may make keratopigmentation a risk that patients underestimate when swayed by viral transformations.
The keratopigmentation phenomenon shows how quickly something can be made viral on social media, regardless of the risks associated with it. Whether keratopigmentation is a fleeting fad or here to stay as a typical cosmetic procedure, it’s clear that the allure of instantly gratifying transformation may not be worth the lifelong risks it comes with.
Tags
eye surgery, health canada, Tiktok trends
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