If you’ve always wanted blue eyes, an article by Claire Bates for the Daily Mail has reported that Dr Gregg Homer, from Stroma Medical in California, has developed a procedure that can change a person’s brown eyes to blue—in just 20 seconds.

The Lumineyes technology uses laser—tuned to a specific frequency—to remove brown pigment (melanin) from the top layer of the iris. (The picture above is the process performed on the bottom half of the eye.)

After two or three weeks, the blue eye color would emerge.

The catch: the procedure is irreversible—as the brown tissue cannot regenerate—and costs approximately US$5,000.

The laser eye-pigment changer took Dr Homer 10 years to develop, and is currently being tested on humans.

If all goes well, the procedure could be available within the US in three years, and outside the US in 18 months.

According to scientists from the University of Copenhagen, eye color is inherited; and blue eyes are a recessive trait and were descended from ancestors with blue eye mutation 6,000-10,000 years ago.

Professor Hans Eiberg of University of Copenhagen said that everyone had brown eyes before this time.

Blue eye pigment doesn’t actually exist in nature. People with blue eyes actually have brown pigment (melanin) at the back of their irises, but low concentrations of it in front of their irises.

The blue-eye mutation is not a positive or negative mutation, and neither does it increase or decrease a human’s chance of survival.

Rather it’s an aesthetic mutation—such as hair color, freckles, and baldness.

[via Daily Mail]


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