Through Adventurous Eyes

I was just a young teen in Canada when I found myself at the mall with time to kill while my mother was running some errands. We walked in through a big department store that had an optical department, and when I was left on my own, my curiosity about coloured contact lenses led me in to investigate these little miracle workers in person. This was around the time that coloured lenses hit the consumer market and all of my fashion magazines were plastered with ads, showing us how we could enhance, or even change, our natural eye colour. Usually they used brown eyes as an example, which is my eye colour, further feeding the general notion that anything was better than brown. (This was around the time that Cindy Crawford lost out on jobs for being too 'exotic'! Thankfully, things have since changed across the pond.)

So I walked in and took a look at the selection of opaque colours, of which there was only one very bold shade option for each. The optician asked if I wanted to try them to see what they looked like, and I excitedly said 'Ok!' and chose green. Everyone goes for blue, but my dad's eyes are hazel green so I figured these would be more believable. A rush of adrenaline raced through me as I anticipated the magic that was about to happen. But this poor guy had the unenviable task of putting a lens on my uncontrollably blinking eyeball, and when he finally got it in, my eye had watered so much that all of my mascara had been washed down my cheek, and in my attempts to wipe it away, I wound up with some on my forehead. The optician looked mortified as he handed me a mirror, and I saw a face smeared in streaky black with one brown eye and one that looked like a green marble from a set of Chinese Checkers. Back then they only had one type of opaque lens, and they were not subtle. They covered the dark ring around your eye and the colour itself, the 'iris', had no tonal variation. If looking soulless and artificial was your thing, they were perfect!

Many years on, coloured contacts have come a looong way. You can get them with a defining ring, the colours are more natural with tonal flecks, and unlike the early versions that were somewhat of a financial commitment, they are no longer expensive. You can easily find cheap contact lenses that are of high quality, and you can switch them up and try different shades as they're meant to be used for just a few weeks. Actually, you can get a pair from a reputable brand for less than the cost of most eyeshadow compacts, which puts them in the same category as say, a pair of fashion eyelashes that you can bring out when you want to be a bit more adventurous (they will keep fresh in a proper contact lens case for 30 days). I wasn't aware of all of this until I had to get reading glasses and began looking into contacts. The idea of playing around with my colour for a tenner is tempting, and with my tendency to wake up with puffy eyes thanks to allergies creeping in through the night, I could use some help in making my eyes more appealing!