Looksmaxxers Are Using This Risky Surgery to Change Their Eye Color
Today, men go to great lengths to look good: they fly to Istanbul for hair transplants, botox their foreheads, and treat injectable peptides like daily multivitamins. Still, the idea of blasting your eyes with a laser until they change color seems far-fetched to almost everyone.
Everyone except the lookmaxxers. For those unfamiliar, looksmaxxing is a hardcore aesthetic enhancement online subculture for young men, whose followers often go to extreme measures to improve their appearance. They also subscribe to a rigid set of male beauty standards, which value light blue eyes. And in recent years, some looksmaxxers have coalesced around a niche procedure called laser depigmentation as the preferred way to get them. Writing on the popular forum Looksmax.org in 2021, one poster said their opinion of the operation had changed from “it’s kind of weird and dangerous” to “awesome”.
Laser depigmentation has become a common topic of discussion on looksmaxxing forums and live streams. During a stream titled “Looksmaxxing Random Homeless People,” Clavicular, the world’s most famous lookmaxxer, spoke to a homeless person about his desire to get laser depigmentation and “really mog” – to be the most handsome guy in the room, in maxese look – with light blue eyes. Another clip shows him recommending the procedure to those with “baked” brown eyes. In a Looksmax.org article from 2025, Clavicule proposed a “geomax” – in plain English, a trip – to Barcelona, where the procedure is supposedly affordable, for laser depigmentation. “You can probably kill tons of hot girls by moving up and living in a mog town,” he writes. “I will [sic] I will do that one day in my life.
Content about eye color surgeries has recently gained popularity, even infamy, on TikTok. There are three types of procedures on the market today: Keratopigmentation, in which channels are etched into the cornea and then filled with pigment, is the most popular and only surgery available in the United States, according to two leading keratopigmentation surgeons. Iris implants, a piece of colored silicone inserted into a slit in the cornea, have a disastrous safety record, according to a 2016 study of the procedure’s cosmetic uses. (2023 documentary by Liza Mandelup, Caterpillar, follows the journey of a patient who received botched iris implants in India from a company called BrightOcular.) Then there’s laser depigmentation, in which the melanin in the iris is destroyed by a laser, revealing lighter tones underneath. Doctors who perform keratopigmentation consistently claim that implants and depigmentation are dangerous and ineffective. The American Academy of Ophthalmology has warned against all three. But laser depigmentation seems to have caught the attention of look-at-lovers for its potential to transform dark brown eyes to light blue.
Although the number of doctors practicing keratopigmentation has gradually increased, according to several renowned ophthalmologists who offer it, there are far fewer practicing laser depigmentation. There are only two major laser depigmentation clinics in the world: Eyecos in Spain and Yeux Clairs in Mexico. An American company, Strōma, has not yet received FDA approval for its patented version of the procedure. According to its website, its services “are not available for sale or use” in the United States. Eyecos’ before and after images show that the eyes turned brown to a sea blue-gray-green not by adding color, but by exposing it. Proponents of laser depigmentation, mainly commenters on forums and the handful of doctors who offer it, say it preserves the structural appearance of the eye, rather than burying it in artificial pigment, for a more natural result. “Depending on the amount of pigment removed, when light shines on the stromal fibers, a shade of blue, green, or hazel is reflected, giving the eye its blue, green, or hazel appearance,” wrote Dr. Marguerite McDonald, an ophthalmologist and consultant for Strōma, in a 2019 publication in Cataract and refractive surgery today.
