Lasers Can Change Your Eye Color

Stroma Medical has come up with a technique that allows you to change your eye color. 37 patients in Mexico and Costa Rica have gone through with this procedure, which permanently turned their eyes from brown to blue. The procedure is around $5,000. In blue-eyed people, when multicolored light falls on the eyes, mostly blue wavelengths are reflected back and picked up by our own eyes. The different between brown-eyed people is that front layer of their eyes called the stroma, which contains a bunch of melanin.

The majority of light hitting the eye is absorb, but the small amount reflected makes them seem brown to us. To go from brown to blue, all you have to do is remove the melanin in the iris. Stroma Medical’s chairman Dr. Gregg Homer explained to CNN how it works: “The fundamental principle is that under every brown eye is a blue eye. The only difference between a brown eye and a blue eye is this very thin layer of pigment on the surface. 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.”