SAN ANTONIO – Local doctors are warning against procedures that can change the color of your eyes permanently.
Dr. Tomy Stark, with UltraVision, specializes in refractive surgery and says these procedure are not approved by the FDA.
One of those procedures involves placing a colored silicone implant or contact lens in front of the iris
Social media star Nadine Bruna was offered a chance to change the color of her eyes using this procedure, but she had to fly to Colombia to get it done. After the procedure, Bruna lost 50 percent of her vision.
"The problem is that that's in a location that no contact should be placed there," Stark said. "Just the fact that it's sitting in the regular color part of the iris, it's chaffing all the time."
Stark said that chaffing causes pieces of the iris to float inside the eye and then get clogged up, producing severe glaucoma.
"These patients are very, very light-sensitive because there is chronic inflammation inside of the eye," Stark said. "This is a potentially blinding procedure as well."
Another potentially blinding procedure is scleral tattooing.
"For Scleral tattoo, people are trying to change the color of the white part of the eye to a dark color like a tattoo and they inject the ink under the conjunctiva," Stark said. "And this is performed by people not trained to put injections in the eye."
Stark said in many cases, people who get this done could not only lose their sight, but their entire eye.
Stark also said for those who use contact lenses to temporarily change their eye color, there's a risk with that too. If the care of the lenses is not adequate, you can get infections using contact lenses as well.