GP Post # 4

Video: Worries Over Circle Contacts Trend
Editor: Unknown
Link

There are so many things to be said about this video. First it worries me that I cannot find and author or an editor anywhere because then I may not have the chance to use it in my GP. Second, this will be the only time Lady Gaga shows up in my blog posts, I promise. Third, "Japanese Cartoons?!" Whatever, call them what you like, I know what they are, you know what they are, and it all started with graphic novels.

On to the real important stuff. This video covers the latest trend in young girls [I had never heard of this until today, some trend]. They are essentially color contacts, which existed before this huge trend, where the iris is larger than a normal color contact. Okay, sounds harmless, right? Well the FDA has not approved them in the United States, I take that to mean that businesses cannot make these products but people can go and buy them from other countries to have them shipped to the USA. Loop hole? I think so.

I was a little bothered when the reporter said that Lady Gaga was inspired by manga. Sure, I saw that music video, I like the song, and I did look at her eyes and say "Hm, that's a little freakish; so what, it's Lady Gaga." Honestly I didn't think anything of it, I wasn't determined to make my eyes look huge and freakish like many characters in mangas that I have read. The reporter also clearly says that her eyes were bigger due to changes made with a computer. She wasn't wearing contacts! So this makes me think that the news company used Lady Gaga to draw attention to this topic because the story would be exactly the same without her; people would be less interested in it and think "Oh, it's just a bunch of nerds with weird contacts."

Being a contact wearer myself I saw this and just thought how funny it was that people who do not need contacts or glasses were putting these contacts in and losing their eyesight because of an infection. Ha! When I was younger I never let anyone wear my glasses because when you wear someone's glasses that are not your own your eyes may adjust and later need those glasses for yourself.

I also found it amusing that people want these things so they can look like fictional characters. It brought me back to the day when I was reading Kare First Love with all of my friends, it's a great series, I highly suggest it. In the first or second book the main character decides to wear contacts instead of her glasses. There is a full page where it shows her with the contact on her finger putting it near her eyes. OH YES! I found it. Good, here we go.

The yellow didn't come out the way I would have liked it, but that's beside the point. Here we see Karin putting in a contact for the first time. Notice the size difference between her eye and the contact she is about to put on her eye. Any normal person can identify that the contact will cover maybe a fifth of her eye. You may say "Why didn't the artist just make the contact bigger?" Well, friend, think about it. How would it look for a perfectly normal sized finger to have a big floppy lens on it? It would look bad! Silly even, sillier than this picture above. This is reasonably acceptable for one of two reasons. Number One: Karin has a rare eye enlargement mutation in which it causes her eyes to be, well enlarged. Number Two: She is a character in a Japanese Manga in which all characters have eyes nearly half the size of their face.

I'm going to go with the latter. It's true, in most mangas and animes the people involved just have larger eyes. This quality is not one to aspire to have, it's not even cool.

So in reality the situation with Karin would be opposite for most human girls. Karin has a big eye and a small contact. Every other girl in the real world has a normal eye and a contact with a huge iris. See something wrong with that?

I guess we're always trying to improve ourselves and this is just a new way for people to do that. Maybe one day they will be legal, then fine, do what ever you like with your eyes, but for now maybe it should be forgotten. Some things like huge eyes are just not meant to be. I personally believe that changing your eye color shows an insecurity you may have with your own eye color, the same is true for hair color. I say if you were born with that color then keep it, you are who you are, not some shade of purple, red or blue.

XDara