Guys today go to great lengths to look good: Theyfly to Istanbulfor hair transplants,Botox their foreheads, and treatinjectable peptideslikedaily multivitamins. Still, the thought of blasting your eyes with a laser until they change color sounds like a stretch to almost everyone.
Laser depigmentation has become acommontopicofdiscussionon looksmaxxing forums and livestreams. During a stream called “Looksmaxxing Random Homeless People,”Clavicular, the world’s most famous looksmaxxer, told an unhoused person about his desire to get laser depigmentation and “really mog”—to be the best-looking guy in the room, in looksmaxese—with light blue eyes.Another clipshows him recommending the procedure for those with “cooked” brown eyes. In one Looksmax.org post from 2025, Clavicular proposed a “geomax”—in plain English, a trip—to Barcelona, where the procedure is supposedly affordable, for laser depigmentation. “You can prob slay tons of hot chicks while ascending and living in a mog city,” he writes. “Ill [sic] do this eventually in my life.”
Content about eye color surgeries have recently gained popularity, or perhaps 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 major keratopigmentation surgeons. Iris implants, a piece of colored silicone inserted through a slit in the cornea, have a disastrous safety record,according to a 2016 study of the procedure’s cosmetic uses. (Liza Mandelup’s 2023 documentary,Caterpillar,follows the journey of a patient who got 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 argue that implants and depigmentation are unsafe and ineffective. The American Academy of Ophthalmology has warnedagainstallthree. But laser depigmentation seems to have captured looksmaxxers’ attention for its potential to turn dark brown eyes into light blue ones.
While the number of doctors who perform keratopigmentation hasgradually increased, according to multiple prominent ophthalmologists who offer it, there are far fewer who perform laser depigmentation. There are only two major laser depigmentation clinics in the world:Eyecos in SpainandYeux Clairsin Mexico. An American company,Strōma, has yet to receiveFDA approvalfor its patented version of the procedure. According to its website, its services are “not available for sale or use” in the US. Before and after images from Eyecos show eyes turned brown eyes to a seawatery blue-gray-green not by adding color, but by exposing it. Laser depigmentation’s proponents, mostly forum commenters and the handful of doctors that offer it, argue that 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 inCataract & Refractive Surgery Today.
The procedure was conceived and developed in the early 2000s and 2010s, around the same time iris implants were becoming notorious and doctors developed keratopigmentation. (Strōma was founded in 2009, according to acofounder’s LinkedIn; Eyecos’swebsitesays it launched in 2012.) But for the past decade, laser depigmentation has been the also-ran of the eye color race. While keratopigmentation typically takes half an hour, laser depigmentation requires multiple daily sessions in a row, with additional rounds potentially required a few months later, according toEyecos’s treatment protocol. Dr. Jorge Alió, a Spanish ophthalmologist who pioneered the therapeutic use of keratopigmentation in the 2010s, says he briefly experimented with laser depigmentation, but abandoned it due to concerns about inflammation and where the laser-blasted melanin was dispersing to. Plus, it comes with far more uncertainty. “You cannot predict the outcome,” Dr. Alió says. “You cannot know which is going to be the final color.”
The way looksmaxxers view eye color is heavily influenced by a 2019 4chanmeme, which proposes a caste system based on eye color using theeye color options from a 1990s doll catalog. (Medicinehas its own classification scales for iris color, but looksmaxxers have settled on the one for dolls.) The overtly racist meme, which proposes a brown-eyed underclass ruled by a blue-eyed minority, has informed the beauty standards, or at least supplied the vocabulary, for how looksmaxxers view eye color. The lightest shade, A10—an icy pale blue whose possessors are “destined to define eras and change history”—is borderline mythical. In one of his manylivestreams, Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, met a woman in a club and found her bright blue eyes literally jaw-dropping. His mouth hung slack as he stared into her A10s. “ What makes someone’s coloring good is how striking they look and how their features contrast with each other,” he said. “So, having blue eyes and super-tanned skin, for example, or having super-light green eyes and blond hair, something like that.”
When I spoke to Clavicular in February, he told me that four of his looksmaxxing friends have changed their eye color, three with laser depigmentation and one with keratopigmentation. He added that the depigmentation patients found it “quite brutal.” One poster on Looksmax.org has shared widely about what he said were his laser depigmentation results, even taking the rare step ofposting part of his face. (Most users avoid doing so due to the threat ofdoxxing.) In one 2023post, beneath a photo he claimed was of his new blue eyes, the poster wrote, “Nobody could imagine that underneath this sand, there was an ocean.”
Clavicular, whose own eye color is hazel, says he doesn’t like the results of keratopigmentation because the resulting appearance of the pigment on the surface is too reflective. He says his friend, who is Arabic and changed his eye color to light blue through keratopigmentation, looks strange. “ It’s very obvious looking that he had some work done,” he says. “The look that he went for wouldn’t exist in nature.”
In general, he says, people are not getting the right eye colors for their skin tone. “ That’s why looksmaxxing is something that’s culturally good, so that people don’t do stupid shit,” he argues. “So they understand, like, phenotypes. They understand a little bit about aesthetics.”
But, Clavicular believes that the results from laser depigmentation are generally better than alternative surgeries. “Even if you can’t control exactly what that looks like, even if you wind up on a weird part of the spectrum that’s a more gray color, that’s still objectively better than having brown eyes,” he says. “So it doesn’t really matter too much, in my opinion, what you end up with underneath, because it’s gonna be an improvement.”
Source: Drudge Report
