I was born with complete heterochromia iridum, which means that my eyes have two completely different colours: left one is brown whilst the right one is green. It's a genetic mutation that, in my case, isn't harmful and is usually found in animals such as dogs and cats, and more uncommonly in humans.
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| A close-up of my eyes |
Back in 2012, I created an account on Wikipedia under the name of "Hardstylehunt3r", which was later changed to "M3D31R0S", before settling in with my current nickname nowadays: ThatAzoreanGuy. Only in the past few years I have become moderately active as an editor, usually fixing little things I come across whilst doing research or expanding on information about the Azores, both on the English and Portuguese Wikipedia.
In 22nd May 2013 (I was almost 15 at the time), I uploaded a photo of my eyes to the heterochromia wiki page as I felt at the time that there was a lack of photos featuring humans with this variation in coloration in comparison with other living beings and three years later, in 28th April, I replaced it with the close-up that you can see above ↑, due to it being in a higher resolution.
Earlier this year, someone recognised my eyes from a YouTube video uploaded by Sherliza Moé, titled "Exposing Sarah McDaniel & Bright Ocular". They appear at 6:28 and as I write this, the video has over 3.7 million views. I am completely okay with this as the uploader simply used the photo from Wikipedia (like many of us do) to explain what is heterochromia. Later on, I found out that I also appear in a video called "Ways Your Eye Color can CHANGE", by Talltanic, at 1:11.
Then, yesterday, my girlfriend decided to reverse image search my photo out of curiosity and brought to my attention that it's not only educational videos that are using it...
The sad part
Apparently, a Turkish 🇹🇷 eye centre called MYlumineyes featured my photo on their front page, under the "CHECK OUT OUR LATEST PROJECTS" section. I sent them an e-mail asking to remove the photo and hours later they replied back and complied, hence why below there's a photo I took for my Instagram story instead of a print-screen.
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| How credible can a doctor that changes eye colours be if his website has stolen photos from Wikipedia (and probably other places) as if they were a result of his procedures? |
Here's where it gets depressingly funny: a Moroccan 🇲🇦 newspaper called Khabar Maghreb, which literally has "Objectivity and Credibility" as their slogan, according to their website's footer, featured the photo on a January 2019 article titled "The first ever operation to change eye color in Morocco".
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| Translated: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.khabarmaghreb.com%2F%3Fp%3D5436Adic |
The page is actually originally in Arabic and the screenshot above was taken after running the website through Google Translate - and if you're like me and can't read Arabic, then click the link below the image to check it out for yourself. One can defend the website and say that they aren't claiming that I'm the one who had an operation done, because if you scroll down there's a photo of the girl that supposedly did it. Okay, fine, but what's the point in using my eyes in the header? I was born with it, it wasn't an operation, and they got it from a website that explains that (in case you, the reader, forgot: Wikipedia).
Whoever wrote this fairly recent article (2nd August 2020) about Horner's syndrome, which, according to NORD, "is a relatively rare disorder characterized by a constricted pupil (miosis), drooping of the upper eyelid (ptosis), absence of sweating of the face (anhidrosis), and sinking of the eyeball into the bony cavity that protects the eye (enophthalmos)" totally got the wrong photo to put in the header. Common sense: heterochromia ≠ Horner's syndrome.
I have no idea how they got that wrong, as you can just check Wikipedia for a photo of someone with that syndrome. And yes, the Turkish Wikipedia (which is what I presume the writer would check) has the correct photo and not mine.
Moving on (or back) to shady eye-colour-changing surgeries, there's this website called eyestheticlaser that features me on their "BEFORE&AFTER" page.
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| Yeah, bro, just crop the photo in two; that's totally a legit before & after. |
The website seems to have been abandoned since many of its pages look like they're incomplete; all the videos in their "vedios" (yes, vedios) and "where we are" pages have been removed from YouTube and the last time there was some activity in their Facebook page was in late 2018.
I assume they are from Batumi, Georgia 🇬🇪 - based on their site's WHOIS record.
I'm aware that there's more websites featuring my eyes, lots of them actually giving credits to where the image is from (like this one from 2017, using the nickname I had in Wikipedia at the time). I just picked the aforementioned four examples to expose their shady businesses or lack of research and giving credits before posting an article.
I want to end this blog post by saying that you should never try to have surgery to change your eye colour. It's not safe and can lead to injuries and/or blindness. Specially when done by "eye doctors" that need to get photos from the internet to "prove" their "results".
Shoutout to @heterochromatics on Instagram for spreading awareness, credible information and real photos on heterochromia and other eye conditions. :)