Circle Lenses: Create Huge Anime-Style Eyes!

Lady Gaga's huge anime-style eyes in her Bad Romance video has unexpectedly spread the fashion trend outside of Asia. Her wide-than-life eyes were most likely generated by a computer, but teenagers and young women nationwide have been copying them with special contact lenses imported from Asia known as circle lenses. These are colored contacts that make eyes appear bigger like barbie dolly eyes, because they cover not just the iris, as normal lenses do, but also part of the whites.

It's illegal in the US to sell any contact lenses - corrective or cosmetic - without a prescription and no major local maker currently sells circle lenses. Yet the lenses are widely available online, typically for US$20 to US$30 a pair (Colored Cosmetic Lens in GEO Ash Wing selling at $29.90 on Amazon), both for prescription-strength and purely decorative makes. Unlike conventional stores, circle-len websites even allow customers to choose the strength of their lenses as freely as their color.

Circle lenses give wearers a child-like, doe-eyed appearance. The look is characteristic of Japanese anime and is also popular in South Korea. Having long since gone mainstream in Japan, Singapore and South Korea, circle lenses are now turning up in American high schools and college campuses. A lady, when interviewed, said her eyes look "really tiny"; the lenses "make them look like they exist". (Source: mypaper)