Vision Loss

The lights are low, the music smoky; you catch her piercing gaze from across the bar. As she saunters over, eyes locked to yours, you wrack you brain for the perfect opening line. But before you can find the right words, an odd metallic gleam catches your attention.

“Is there…something in your eye?”
“Oh, it’s my JewelEye,” she croons, blinking a few times for emphasis.
Thinking she may have had a few too many stiff ones, you ask her to repeat.
“Jewel-Eye,” she giggles. “It’s Dutch.”

This does little to explain what looks like a piece of heart-shaped shrapnel lodged in her ocular conjunctiva. But you buy her a drink, all the while wondering what those crazy Europeans will think of next.

Welcome to the future of body modification, where tattoos, septum rings, and 3-inch plugs are no longer enough to stand out in a crowd. Yes, in the true spirit of innovation, today’s young and restless have found an even more cringe-inducing way to shock the parents. The JewelEye, a small platinum implant that is placed under a thin membrane in the white of the eye, was developed by a surgeon at the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery (NIIOS) back in 2002. Never to be outdone by their Continental counterparts, Los Angeles residents soon flocked to a local ophthalmologist who offered extraocular implants, Dr. Robert Maloney. While other ophthalmologists have dismissed the procedure as dangerous and unnecessarily invasive, Maloney maintains that the JewelEye is not only safe, but also “really exciting and interesting and beautiful and a little bit edgy.”

But if Maloney’s bubbling recommendation hasn’t sold you, you may be swayed the NIIOS website. “It is of all times for people to wear jewelry,” it cryptically insists, making you wonder if the JewelEye isn’t, in fact, the mod of the new Millennium.

But whether the fad will stick or fade like so much Crystal Pepsi has yet to be seen. And in the meantime, you may want to stick to something tried and true, like a puncture to the ol’ nasal cartilage. Ah, those were the days…