Always Wanted Blue Eyes? All You Need Is $12,000, 25 Minutes, and a Stomach for Experimental Surgery

Once upon a time, eye color was one of the few aesthetic features that could not be altered in a doctor’s office. In recent years, enterprising ophthalmologists have developed surgeries to change that. And men are embracing the procedure.Michael Houtz; Getty ImagesOn a Thursday afternoon, in the office of Dr. Alexander Movshovich on East 56th Street, in Manhattan, a bleary-eyed 30-something Latino man in tight jeans and a tight T-shirt with a tight face is led out of the surgery room. A surgical assistant helps him onto a cream-colored armchair, removes his hairnet and shoe covers, and offers him some coffee. She hands the man a mirror, but his vision is still blurry, and he can’t make out his reflection yet. “The Time (Dirty Bit)” by the Black Eyed Peas is playing softly in the background. He nervously looks around the room at the surgical assistant, the receptionist (acting as a Spanish translator), and me. He wants to know how he looks. I demur, because we’ve only just met and I’m here as a journalist and it has been 10 years since my last Spanish class, but he insists on hearing what I think. So, I stare into his eyes, which he has just had permanently changed from brown to one of Dr. Movshovich’s proprietary hues, Honey Gold. I tell him, “Me parece bien,” and he smiles.Dr. Movshovich is one of a small handful of ophthalmologists around the world who perform keratopigmentation, a $12,000 laser eye-color-changing surgery. He has done about 1,800 people (or 3,600 eyes) since he began offering the procedure in 2019, and 2026 is shaping up to be his biggest year yet. He has streamlined the procedure so that it typically takes just 25 minutes. His office even prepares a note for patients to bring to the DMV to explain why their eye color no longer matches what it says on their license.We used to be stuck with our eye color. From when it finalizes around age six to the day we die, it's one of the few human traits that remain fixed. Maybe you have your mother’s hue. But just as modern medicine has changed the shapes of noses, the wrinkling of foreheads, and the angles of jaws, it is now shifting the color of our eyes, too. Since the 2010s, keratopigmentation has become increasingly popular among a brave cohort of people willing to subject their eyes to lasers for purely cosmetic reasons, many of whom are men. According to two of the most prominent surgeons performing the procedure in the US, about one third of their patients are men—an especially high percentage compared to other cosmetic surgeries. As social-media-savvy doctors inch keratopigmentation into the mainstream, eye color change may very well become the next nose job.People have been trying—and mostly failing—to change their eye color for a surprisingly long time. Circa 150 CE, the Roman physician Galen of Pergamon tattooed someone’s cornea using a hot needle and powdered iron to hide a corneal opacity (a cloudy white spot on the eye). In 1869, Louis De Wecker modernized the procedure, using India ink and a needle—a bit like an eyeball stick-and-poke, with cocaine as a topical anesthetic. During the Holocaust, the Nazis commissioned Projekt Augenfarbe or “Project Eye Color.” Under its direction, according to archival research by a Dutch ophthalmologist, Dr. Josef Mengele performed heinous experiments on Auschwitz prisoners in an attempt to change their eye color in accordance with Nazi ideology. At least one baby died after having adrenaline eyedrops applied, and many other individuals, including children, were murdered so their eyes could be studied.Fast-forward to the 2000s med-spa-ssaince, when a few companies reintroduced the idea under far less violent circumstances. NewColorIris, in Panama, and BrightOcular, in India, began offering iris implants—colored pieces of silicone inserted into the cornea through a slit—for cosmetic eye color change as early as 2002, according to patent records, news reports, and medical case studies. Over the next 20 years, patients flew to these clinics from around the world to receive iris implants. The results were often disastrous. In a 2015 study of 12 BrightOcular patients who got their eye color changed, only seven still had normal vision and two had medically uncontrollable glaucoma. Another study found that 68.8% of patients with cosmetic iris implants have had them removed due to severe complications. The American Academy of Ophthalmology “strongly discourage[s] consumers from undergoing this surgery, due to the documented potential damage to healthy vision.” (Cosmetic iris implants have never been approved in the United States or Europe.)“A lot of people that gravitate towards the procedure really want something that will change the future of their life,” says Liza Mandelup, a filmmaker who followed a man’s horrible experience with BrightOcular in her 2023 documentary, Caterpillar. (Spoiler alert: Toward the middle of the documentary, the subject emerges from surgery to discover that his doctors made a careless mistake and gave him the wrong color implants. When he bursts into tears, a nurse begs him not to cry, as it might damage his eyes.)Mandelup says she became interested in the topic of eye-color-changing surgeries after complimenting a woman on her beautiful blue eyes. She says the woman replied that she had had them “done” in India. Mandelup checked out BrightOcular’s YouTube videos and was surprised by the self-actualization focus of their marketing. But finding people to interview for the film proved challenging. “A lot of people honestly didn’t want to talk to us because they were so upset about the outcome,” she says. “They were really going through very, very serious medical issues with it, and people were very traumatized and they had blamed themselves.”While researching this story, I encountered the self-improvement-themed marketing-speak that Mandelup described firsthand. To contact BrightOcular as a prospective patient, the clinic’s website instructed me to send a voice message on WhatsApp verifying my name. In response, I quickly received four different PDFs, including an eye color menu, and numerous selfies of past patients. One document began: “You have taken the 1st step to enhancing your life and having those beautiful new eyes that you can truly call your own!” (In a later email to GQ, BrightOcular acknowledged “serious complications documented with the anterior chamber technique” and claimed to have adopted a new, supposedly safer method.)In 2011, a French ophthalmologist named Francis Ferrari took note of the surprising demand for eye color change. While discussing iris-implant complications with French colleagues on the internet, he says, he began to wonder about another method that he hypothesized would be safer: What if he could place color in the cornea, not the iris, as has been done for millennia? And what if he used a femtosecond laser, the same tool used for Lasik and other eye surgeries? “Once I had the idea in my head, I was not able to remove it,” Dr. Ferrari says. “ I had to do it.”In December 2013, he pitched his idea to a patient, a middle-aged French woman, who he had already been in for a consultation on a cosmetic color change. She agreed to be the first person to undergo it. Dr. Ferrari performed the procedure, creating incisions in her corneas with the laser, connected by a circular tunnel. He then filled it with mineral ink used for skin tattoos. When he finished, her eyes had transformed from dark brown to a muted hunter green. Dr. Ferrari had successfully performed the first laser eye color change in the world.Or so he thought. Corneal tattooing can also be used to treat patients with photophobia, or extreme sensitivity to light. And in 2011, ophthalmologist Jorge Alió of Alicante, Spain, treated a patient with severe photophobia and double vision caused by a disease of the iris. He fixed her vision by cutting a channel into her cornea with a laser, then placing dye in it. Without knowing it, two European eye surgeons had simultaneously been inventing femtosecond laser-assisted annular keratopigmentation, or FLAAK. Today, keratopigmentation, as most doctors now call it, is the most widely accepted way to permanently change your eye color. Dr. Ferrari and Dr. Alió amicably share credit for the procedure, emphasizing that neither was aware of the other at the time. Dr. Ferrari notes, politely, that he did the first cosmetic keratopigmentation.According to Dr. Alió, just five doctors account for performing the vast majority of procedures worldwide. Two of them are American, one for each coast: Dr. Movshovich, with offices in Manhattan and Miami, and Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler of Beverly Hills. Both are experienced, esteemed eye surgeons. Dr. Movshovich is a clinical associate professor at Weill Cornell Medicine who has been a practicing physician since 1978. Dr. Boxer Wachler gained prominence for inventing several treatments for keratoconus, a bulge in the cornea that affects as many as 1 in 400 people. In 2007, he treated American bobsled driver Steven Holcomb, who was losing his vision and career to keratoconus. After Holcomb led the American bobsled team to Olympic gold in Vancouver in 2010, Dr. Boxer Wachler renamed his proprietary treatment Holcomb C3-R.Keratopigmentation has three main steps, according to the four doctors I spoke to who perform the procedure. First, a laser cuts a donut-shaped channel in the cornea, the clear, outermost layer of the eye in front of the colored iris. Second, because the cornea is not perfectly round, the channel must be manually expanded to the correct ovoid shape while preserving a natural-looking limbal ring, a dark circle that surrounds the colored part of the iris. This, according to the doctors, is where their skill really comes in. Both Dr. Boxer Wachler and Dr. Movshovich have their own tools and techniques for doing it. “That’s really the first time that it’s not just being a surgeon, but it’s also being like a sculptor or an artist,” Dr. Boxer Wachler says. “Plastic surgeons do this all the time. But for ophthalmologists, this is something that [we] never have to do.” Then, the channel is filled with pigment. The whole thing takes less than 30 minutes. “ Most people describe it, as a reference, as being easier than getting your teeth cleaned,” says Dr. Boxer Wachler.In 2024, the American Academy of Ophthalmology issued a warning against the procedure, citing “serious risks for vision loss and complications.” Crucially, the warning was issued against both iris implants and keratopigmentation, to the ire of the surgeons who perform the latter. (The warning does list risks for keratopigmentation specifically, including photophobia, dye leakage, and infection.) Drs. Movshovich, Boxer Wachler, Alió, and another, Dr. Keith Walter, furious about being lumped with what they consider to be a horrifically dangerous procedure, immediately wrote a response to the AAO defending keratopigmentation’s safety record, asking for the statement to be withdrawn. According to a spokesperson, AAO representatives met with Dr. Alió shortly after and responded to Dr. Boxer Wachler via letter, in which they maintained that “the statement was meant to help educate the public of all possible outcomes” and that the Academy did not plan to withdraw it. The Academy’s position remains unchanged, and the risks it warned of have been confirmed in new literature and patient cases, according to the spokesperson.The FDA does not approve medical procedures, but it does approve the devices used. The femtosecond laser is approved for procedures like LASIK, so its use for keratopigmentation is considered off-label. Of the four keratopigmentation surgeons I spoke to, all of them believe it is safe and stressed that they would never offer it were it not. They point to the medical literature: One study in Cornea, coauthored by Dr. Alió, found that 92.5% of cases had excellent patient satisfaction. The rest needed redos or color alterations, but every patient wound up “cosmetically satisfied.” Dr. Ferrari contributed to a literature review last year, arguing that, “despite some controversy, studies have shown femtosecond-assisted KTP [keratopigmentation] to be a very safe procedure with a benign safety profile and high levels of patient satisfaction.”Most people find out about keratopigmentation from TikToks and Reels, according to doctors and patients I spoke to. And in the small pond of keratopigmentation short-form video, Dr. Boxer Wachler is the undisputed big fish. Pushed by his daughters to start a TikTok during the pandemic, he has now racked up 3.4 million followers by posting videos of patients reacting to their new eyes, freshly pigmented in colors like Steel Grey, Paris Blue, Emerald Green, and Riviera Blue. The captions ask viewers to “Guess the Intensity,” which can be low, medium, or high depending on the amount of pigment used. The comments are usually a mix of shock, revulsion, and suspicion. Many simply reply with: “🧿👄🧿”Dr. Matias Soifer, a South Florida–based eye surgeon, recently took to commenting on every keratopigmentation post on Dr. Boxer Wachler’s Instagram with warnings against the procedure. He’s especially concerned about whether it could make other medically necessary eye surgeries challenging, or that there may be unknown complications in the future. “ I’m not beefing with anyone,” he says. “I’m just advising patients to do their homework before getting this done. The virality, the catchiness, the flashy eyes—these kinds of intense, bizarre colors might be attractive to an extent where they might fool you.”In a way, Dr. Boxer Wachler can relate to his patients: He found out about keratopigmentation from TikTok, too. It was only after his followers kept asking about cosmetic keratopigmentation that he considered offering the procedure himself. “ Being open-minded and creative and also being a scientist, I was thinking, ‘Okay, well, that’s interesting,’” he says. He began reading Dr. Ferrari’s and Dr. Alió’s research, then learned how to do it, drawing on his experience with corneal surgery. He officially began offering the service in 2024. “There was, in the beginning, a bit of a learning curve, because I had to figure out there’s different levels of intensity of the color,” he says. “Some people want more of a dramatic effect, where it’s really noticeable and their eyes pop, so to speak. But most people want it to just look more natural.”The color-change procedure starts at $12,000 at KERATO and the Boxer Wachler Vision Institute, with additional fees based on special requests and preexisting factors. Both doctors report that financing is extremely popular with the CareCredit card, which can give you up to two years interest-free. Dr. Movshovich’s office estimates 20% to 30% of their patients use financing of some kind.Dr. Movshovich has a Russian accent, a short salt-and-pepper beard, six children, and the boundless confidence of a surgeon. (While I was reporting this story, he asked me what percentage of the world is stupid, then answered his own question: “Ninety percent.”) At his New York and Miami clinics, the process of changing one’s eye color begins with a consultation. Many patients come in with references after studying his work online, including a steady stream of before-and-after photos on his Instagram. “ They may watch my Instagram or just the website for years,” Dr. Movshovich says, checking to see if anything goes wrong. “They wait until I’m either going to fuck up, or [I’m] going to show this is a safe procedure.” As a legal protection, Dr. Movshovich has patients copy, by hand, a paragraph explaining that this is not FDA-approved, is experimental, and entails risks of minor complications.During the meeting, Dr. Movshovich creates digital simulations showing the patient with Honey Gold, Hazelnut, Aqua Green, Jade, Olive, Space Grey, or Magical Grey eyes at various intensity levels. In the end, he says, most patients allow him to guide their decision, for which he draws on his lifelong photography hobby. The right shade should complement their hair and skin color, and many patients with dark eyes want their pupils to “pop” more. “Beautification is not a major thing in science, but I think it is,” Dr. Movshovich says. “You know, beauty will save the world.”The day I visited Dr. Movshovich’s office, the procedure began with another short consultation. He confirmed the patient’s color and intensity choice and reiterated the most important thing for the patient to keep in mind during the procedure: Do not move. Patients are given numbing eyedrops but are not put under for the surgery, and Dr. Movshovich considers even slight shifting the biggest risk for complications. (In the seven-year history of his practice, someone has moved only once during the laser portion of the procedure, causing the laser to cut the wrong part of the eye. He was able to complete the surgery after letting the patient heal for two months.)After the aesthetic details of the surgery were finalized, the patient (who allowed me to view the procedure but declined to be interviewed) put on a hairnet and shoe covers and was ushered into the sterilized room. Dr. Movshovich had arranged for me to observe the surgery through a window from the recovery area, where I could see both the chair where the patient lies and a wall-mounted TV via which the surgery is broadcast live, thanks to macro cameras trained directly on the patient’s eye. This had the effect of an All-Seeing Eye above the surgery, like the ones on the billboard in The Great Gatsby. I recalled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg’s eyes as “blue and gigantic.” This guy’s eyes were gigantic, too, but brown—and in five minutes, they’d be Honey Gold.He laid back in the chair, squeezing two emoji stress balls. After applying numbing drops, Dr. Movshovich wiped iodine onto the surrounding area and placed a plastic cover over the left eye. A giant white machine was lowered over the right. A green dot was trained above the center of the eye, and the laser did its work, carving out the channel in about 10 seconds. Then, Dr. Movshovich expanded it to create the appropriate shape and limbal ring, using a patented instrument that he considers his hallmark. “ That’s the important part of the instrumentation,” he says. “That’s why people come to me.”The bulk of the 20-odd minutes is spent expanding the channel and placing the pigment with Dr. Movshovich’s proprietary tool: a metal surgical knife with a “kidney-shaped” tip, which goes inside a laser-cut slit at the center of the eye, then curls around the cornea. The color is applied as a liquid pigment on the tip of the tool. Dr. Movshovich’s assistant, Lana, prepares it on a table next to the operating chair. To place the pigment, Dr. Movshovich wiggles the tip, jostling the eyeball more roughly than I expected or frankly thought an eyeball could withstand. One of the nurses gigglingly took a photo of my squeamish expression at this point. I also noted some stress-ball-squeezing and toe-clenching from the patient. After a few more passes of the hook, the patient was escorted to the recovery area, blinking, bloodshot, and grinning with anticipation.So, who gets their eye color changed? Dr. Movshovich says his patients range in age from 21 to 74, but most are in their 30s and 40s. One third of his patients are men. Within that, his most common demographic is Latinos, who often choose Honey Gold and green shades. Second is Black patients, who tend to prefer green, followed by white patients who go for gray and green. Dr. Boxer Wachler says his clientele is comparable. That potentially makes keratopigmentation one of the most male-leaning plastic surgeries in the United States. (For comparison, men accounted for 34% of cosmetic ear surgeries and 26% of cheek implants, the most male-centric cosmetic surgeries according to 2024 data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.) And at least anecdotally, that share may be growing. The day I went to observe the procedure, both patients Dr. Movshovich saw were men. He has been “surprised” by how many men come to get it. “Last week, it was only men who had the procedure,” says Dr. Boxer Wachler. “Now that I think about it, we might even be skewing more men.”Dr. Movshovich’s receptionist, Haidi Garcia, says that because it’s less common for men to get cosmetic surgery of any kind, she likes to ask male patients what brought them in. Most of them answer with “ It’s something new… I saw this online and I thought this was cool, so I reached out to you guys,” says Garcia, who as of publication no longer works in Dr. Movshovich’s office. She adds that the office gets a lot of “Kens” (as in Barbie and Ken) who have already had procedures like pectoral implants, fat transfers, and Brazilian butt lifts.This is almost never someone’s first body modification. Dr. Movshovich says 90% of his patients have tattoos, and many keratopigmentation patients are already experienced with cosmetic surgery. For many patients, the desire to change their eye color comes from the simple urge to switch up one’s look. “ Why not?” says Damian Sargent, a San Francisco hairstylist who turned his eyes green over three sessions with Dr. Movshovich in 2025. (Keratopigmentation usually happens in just one procedure, but Sargent agreed to try a new idea of Dr. Movshovich’s, in which hazel was applied, then partially removed and replaced with olive at a later date to create a natural-looking blend.) “I have this constant joke where I’m like, ‘Yay, science!’ Like, I think we’re at this really cool point where if you don’t like something about your appearance, or you want to enhance it, or you want to change it, you can do it.”Sargent got the idea to change his eye color years ago after hearing about NewColorIris online. After months of intense online research, he opted for keratopigmentation because he felt it had a better safety record. “ The doctor was kind of spooked by me when I got there because I was like, I even know you’re a Cancer,” he says, referring to Dr. Movshovich’s zodiac sign. Other than two days of irritation following each session, Sargent has had no complications. He found the whole thing easy compared to other cosmetic procedures, calling it “a thousand percent” better than when he got veneers. “ The hardest part is I couldn’t have caffeine in the morning,” he says. “And, oh my God—no lotion on your face.”When he saw friends, family, or clients after the procedure, Sargent asked them if they noticed anything different. “ They’re like, ‘Did you get more Botox?’ And I'm like, ‘Bitch, yes. Always,’” he says. “‘Did you notice that maybe I have green eyes now?’ And they all shit their pants.”Sargent expects keratopigmentation’s popularity to explode as it becomes more trusted as a medical procedure and more doctors learn how to perform it. “ I think it’s just a matter of time until this probably becomes as common as, like, a boob job or a nose job,” he says.Dr. Boxer Wachler says that many of his patients get keratopigmentation out of a desire to “match” family members with different color eyes. Jacob Jacobs, an aspiring model from LA, was born with brown eyes. He got hazel eyes from Dr. Boxer Wachler to match his daughters’, brothers’, and dad’s. Plus, he figured bolder eyes might also help his modeling career. “ I’m trying to get out there and get recognized,” he says. “I just thought it was a good opportunity for me to go ahead and see what this doctor can do.”The day of his surgery, Jacobs didn’t tell his wife what he was going to the doctor for until they arrived at the office. “ Me and the doctor, we just smiled at her and then we broke the news to her,” he says. “I didn't want to tell her because I thought she was gonna get mad at me, you know?”The oldest data we have on keratopigmentation is from the first European procedures 15 years ago, and Dr. Ferrari reports “no medical issues” long-term, though there has been fading of color. As the body of evidence grows, he expects the medical community and general public to come around. “ I think maybe we need 10 more years to be completely accepted by the eye doctors,” he says.Dr. Alió echoes Dr. Ferrari’s concern about fading pigments. He says some he used in past procedures diluted over the course of just a year or two, causing the color of his patient’s eyes to fade. “ From the surgical perspective, the technique is safe,” Dr. Alió says. “But the pigments are not properly developed.”The most common pigments used in keratopigmentation today are created by two French companies, Neoris and Biotic Phocea. Dr. Ferrari is a shareholder in the former. Dr. Movshovich has worked to develop more stable pigments with the latter, including a better Honey Gold. (During the consultation I observed, Dr. Movshovich counseled the patient against an older version of Honey Gold that he had found was turning yellow.) It seems that some pigments degrade and evolve over time in the eye, like a sun-bleached T-shirt. “ Some of them are very good and very stable,” says Dr. Alió. “Some of them are very bad, and they don’t last as well. They change color, so we still have room for development.”Dr. Movshovich, in particular, hopes to develop a better-performing blue—what he describes to me as “really esoteric blue”—and steers patients to gray options for the time being. Another clinic in France advertises “husky eyes” with a “bright, icy tone.” Some of Dr. Boxer Wachler’s TikTok commenters compare his blue results to Game of Thrones’ White Walkers or Mountain Dew Baja Blast.The next frontier for keratopigmentation is developing the ability to undo it. Dr. Movshovich has achieved what he calls up to “85 or 90 percent reversibility” by physically scratching out pigment with a special needle, up from 40% on his earliest attempts. But while much of the added pigment can be removed, the eye can’t be completely returned to normal—a light tinge of the artificial coloring typically remains. Dr. Ferrari says only about 2% of his patients want their procedure reversed. “Doing the keratopigmentation is very easy,” Dr. Ferrari says. “Removing it is more complicated.”Overall, it seems like a good time to be a keratopigmentation doctor. Dr. Boxer Wachler thinks he’ll do a thousand procedures this year. Dr. Ferrari estimates that 10 new doctors learn it every year, which will cause growth to snowball. “ When I was alone, a lot of patients were afraid, seeing that only one doctor was doing it,” he says. “But now that there are much more than one, they have more confidence.”After his procedure in December 2025, Jacob Jacobs dealt with some light sensitivity for a month but says he is feeling great now. He enjoys the surprised reactions his new eyes get. Many people say he looks a wolf, and his boss jokingly threatened him with a drug test. His mother was skeptical at first, but she eventually came around. “ She’s still in disbelief, but she loves it,” he says. “ She’s like, I hope your eyes don’t go back to regular color, because those look nice.”Sign up for Manual to receive useful advice on style, health, and more, five days a week.Charlie Sosnick is a freelance writer based in New York, covering internet subcultures, men’s health, and food. He has self-published three books and written three short films. ... Read More