A clinic in the Swiss city of Lausanne has made the headlines for offering a 9.000-franc treatment that changes your eye colour. While not banned in Switzerland, doctors have warned against the use of keratopigmentation, which they argue can lead to major side effects.
According to a report from Watson, a clinic said to be operating in Lausanne and Nice has been offering a procedure that permanently changes a patient’s eye colour. The Instagram page offering the treatment, made anonymous in the report, includes testimonials from patients who say the procedure “changed their lives” for the better.
The surgery, called keratopigmentation, changes a person’s eye colour permanently through a tattoo that is engraved on a person’s cornea. This is done using a femtosecond laser - an instrument that is able to emit pulses of light every few quadrillionths of a second.
Using the laser, cavities are etched into the cornea before being filled with a pigment. According to Watson’s Juliette Baur, those with brown eyes are the most common patients, with blue the most chosen eye colour. The clinic in question confirmed to the newspaper that the treatment is possible in Switzerland. The price? 8.990 euros or roughly 9.000 francs - perhaps obviously, all those who take the treatment are not covered by health insurance and must pay for it out of their own pockets.
Needless to say, the idea of getting laser eye surgery to grab yourself some blue oceans was not advised by doctors. Speaking to Watson, president of the Swiss Ophthalmological Society Christoph Kniestedt strongly advised against the treatment.
He noted that in some cases keratopigmentation can lead to corneal scarring, glare, reduced vision and even total loss of vision in some extreme cases. What’s more, he noted that even if there are no complications, the results of some operations have been underwhelming, with patients reporting a more dull and faded eye colour than expected, especially when exposed to sunlight.
Therefore, Kniestedt recommended that those wanting to change their eye colour should simply buy some coloured contact lenses instead.