Ulku Dogan had surgery to make her eyes blue after wearing colored contact lenses for years.
Keratopigmentation involves making a channel in the cornea and placing colored dye inside.
The procedure has gained traction online but isn’t FDA-approved.
Ulku Dogan, a wealth advisor in San Francisco, wore coloured contact lenses for 20 years because she wished she had blue eyes.
Seven weeks ago, her dream came true when she flew to New York and paid $12,000 for surgery to permanently change her brown eyes to blue.
“I feel confident and happy. “It is the best investment I have ever made for myself,” Dogan, 49, told Business Insider. “I wish I had done this 10 years ago.”
To change her eye colour, Dr. Kevin Niksarli, one of only a few ophthalmic surgeons in the United States who perform cosmetic keratopigmentation, used a laser to create two holes in her corneas, the clear, outermost part of the eye. This creates a channel above the coloured part of the eye, which is then filled with dye.
Niksarli has been performing corneal laser eye surgeries for 30 years and began offering the procedure to patients in 2023. Patients at Manhattan LASIK Centre can choose from 11 different shades, including emerald green, lagoon, and honey.
First, he coloured Dogan’s left eye. He let her assess it and asked if she wanted to change the colour before moving on to the right eye.
“I am like, ‘Doctor, can you go a little brighter?'” “And then he got a little brighter, which I loved,” Dogan said.
Although keratopigmentation is not FDA-approved, interest in the procedure is increasing. In medicine, it is used to treat patients who have lost their iris, had it damaged, or experienced trauma. However, TikTok videos featuring before-and-after photos of patients who underwent the procedure for aesthetic reasons have received millions of views.
Dr. Alexander Movshovich, who became the first doctor to offer the cosmetic procedure in the United States in 2019, told The Wall Street Journal that he saw 15 patients in his first year. He has now done the procedure over 750 times, he told Ophthalmology Times.
“This procedure is safe, as demonstrated in the peer-reviewed literature,” Movshovich told BI in an email, noting that people with chronic eye diseases would require an individual consultation to determine whether they were a suitable candidate.
The American Academy of Opthalmology warns against cosmetic eye treatments
Dogan said that the permanent procedure is quick and does not hurt. The only side effects he experienced were pain on the first night and some light sensitivity for a few days.
But some doctors say there is not enough proof that the pros of cosmetic eye surgery are greater than the known and possible long-term cons.
The American Academy of Ophthalmology warned in January that keratopigmentation could lead to infections, sensitivity to light, and damage to the cornea that could make it cloudy, warped, leak fluid, or cause vision loss.
“Patients contemplating these procedures for cosmetic reasons alone must weigh these serious risks against the potential gain,” AAO said.
In a study published in the Journal of Cornea and External Disease in 2021, 12 out of 40 people who had keratopigmentation became sensitive to light in the first month.
Five of them said the colour faded or changed after 29 months, and one of them who had Lasik surgery developed corneal ectasia, a condition that makes the cornea thin and bulge outward. Everyone who took part said they were happy with how they looked afterward.
An optometrist in Canada named Dr. Julian Prosia said in a TikTok video, “If it were up to me, I would rather use coloured contacts for their cosmetic benefits than risk long-term side effects that we do not even know about because research has not even been able to go that far.”
Movshovich and three other ophthalmologists who do or study the procedure wrote to the AAO in July and said that many of the risks listed on the AAO warning “have never happened with keratopigmentation” and are “not based on fact.”
The AAO told BI that it agrees with the evidence that was given. “Getting out of bed in the morning is one of the risks that come with living.” The question is how common, bad, or fixable are the bad outcomes compared to possible good outcomes or other options?
“The math for medical and therapeutic uses is very different from that for cosmetic procedures,” the AAO’s CEO, Stephen D. McLeod, wrote in an email to BI.
Dogan was willing to take the risk
Dogan had thought about iris implant surgery, in which a silicone plastic fake iris is put into a cut in the cornea and shaped to fit over the real iris.
The surgery was not available in the US at the time, though, and she thought it was too dangerous. The American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) said in January that iris implant surgery could damage the eye permanently and lead to glaucoma and vision loss.
Keratopigmentation was new to her until a trusted friend who is a plastic surgeon had it done.
“He got his eye coloured, and I am like, ‘What else do I need?'” Dogan told me. “It is confirmed results.” She quickly set up a meeting with his surgeon.
Dogan knew that the surgery could have risks, but she chose to go through with it anyway, and she is happy with the results.
“Now, when people ask me, ‘Do you wear contacts?’ “They can say, ‘No, these are my eyes,'” she said.