Bad idea! Say specialists to Lady Gaga’s ‘bathtub lenses’ craze.

Of all the weird accessories and costumes Lady Gaga wears, who’d imagine something like the huge, wider-than-life eyes she kept flashing from the bathtub of her ‘Bad Romance’ video will catch the trend craze it did with youngsters.

The huge anime-style eyes, most likely generated from computer special effects, has caught teenagers and young women in the grips of a wildfire trend that seems too have raged right across the U.S. to Japan, Singapore, and South Korea in particular. Where they are all trying to copy the ‘ga-ga’ look using special contact lenses – called circle lenses. These lenses, if it may be said, have tended to become something of a style vocabulary for many of the youngsters, and especially to-show for their Facebook photos.

These circle lenses are basically coloured lenses – and all of them in a spectrum of weird-to-weirder shades like smooth violets and melting pinks – that make the eyes look not just larger but, as most will agree, striking and attention grabbing. What is actually happening here, to give that enlarged bulbous look is simply that the lenses cover not just the iris, as normal lenses do too, but also cover part of the whites!

These lenses, widely available online, for anywhere from $20 to $30 a pair, come in both prescription strengths and, a lot more frequently, the purely decorative. Giving the wearer a wideeyed, childlike and doe-eyed appearance, a look quite characteristic of Japanese anime and also in Korea. A look which, now with the success of the video’s promotion, has only got the youngsters going totally ‘ga-ga’ over it. Fame seeking youths – or ‘ulzzang girls’ – as they are popularly called – post cute but sexy headshots of themselves online, wearing circle lenses to accentuate the eyes. (In Korean, ‘ulzzang’ means best face and is also shorthand for ‘pretty’).

Dr. S. Barry Eiden, chairman of the contact lens and cornea section of the American Optometric Association, warned that people selling circle lenses online “are encouraging the avoidance of professional care”, and that ill-fitting contact lenses could deprive the eye of oxygen and cause serious vision problems of all kinds.

However, despite many such warnings from specialists and informed sources, the sheer groundswell of users online has tended to make even cautious youngsters comfortable with the idea of donning these circle lenses. Giving the trend, what some specialists have called, the ‘ill legitimacy of numbers’ that often drive fads that should never have been in the first place.

Picking up on the highly questionable trend a make-up artist, Michelle Phan even introduced a YouTube video called ‘Lady Gaga Bad Romance Look’ demonstrating how to get “crazy, googly Lady Gaga eyes”. The video has been viewed more than 9.4 million times!

Coming Soon: ‘Super Lenses’ with promise of those three magic words: “No More Glasses!”

Lenses aren't exactly lagging behind in medicine's march toward things better, higher and accessible for patients. Bionic implants that promise give back the 40 plus lot their vision-at-20 year-ago could be available in less than 5-years from now.

Those fitted with these implants – which can correct both long and short-sightedness – will not only allow patients to throw away their glasses but, most significantly, will never develop cataracts with advancing years. In the words of Professor James Wolffsohn, spoken at the British Association's Festival of Science, “this is the true definition of a bionic eye. You are replacing something that has aged in the eye with a technological structure”.

“This is merely evolution to the next level”, adds Prakash Vasudevan, CEO, SARV Medicare International, the IOL company which is looking to introduce a whole new benefit-basket to IOL patients worldwide, Which it is since this new concept is built on progresses in existing technologies. Starting with delicate plastic lens that have long been implanted during cataract surgery for decades. Followed by the more flexible but, largely, single-focus accommodating IOLs (intra ocular lenses) i.e. which treat either long or short sightedness.

The biggest market for these lenses – which are which are still around 5 years or more from the market and expected to cost under $ 2,000 (Rs. 1,60,000) – are projected to be among those who start to wear reading glasses around middle-age.