When a supplier dropped off a batch of new costume contact lenses last month at the Casey Eye Institute on the sprawling medical campus at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, optometrist Patrick Caroline made a prediction: They won't sell.
Caroline has since: sold about 40 pairs of the lenses, called WildEyes, which come in eight colors and designs, such as an ocher cat's eye, an aqua starburst and a black "pool shark" with a tiny black eight ball.
"People are just going gaga over these," said Caroline, whose customers are mostly medical, dental and nursing students willing to shell out at least $99 for the novelty of displaying eyeballs in colors and designs not found in nature.
"I expect they'll get even bigger the closer it gets to Halloween," added Caroline, who estimates that half of his customers don't need contact lenses and buy strictly for cosmetic purposes.
Yet the popularity of these lenses worries Caroline, who fears they will cause eye injuries and infections if wearers fail to disinfect or to clean them properly.
"I worry that people are only going to wear these lenses sporadically and in the meantime they'll let them sit in saline solution that isn't sterile and hasn't been changed in six months" and then will pop them in their eyes, he said. "These are not going to be used like other contact lenses that are cleaned and stored in fresh solution every day."
Caroline's concerns are echoed by ophthalmologists, optometrists and others who dispense contact lenses. Some of these eye specialists regard the lenses as a potentially dangerous fad and cite instances in which teenagers have shared lenses with their friends, a practice the manufacturer explicitly cautions against. Others see the lenses as a relatively harmless, if somewhat expensive, fashion statement.
Ann Foppe, a spokeswoman for lens manufacturer Wesley Jessen of Des Plaines, III., says the lenses as a "real fun product." Foppe said the lenses are safe as long as wearers take the same basic safety precautions required of all contact-lens wearers. "We haven't had any complaints about WildEyes," Foppe said.
But Terrence P. O'Brien, director of ocular infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute, does not view them as benign.
"This is a dangerous trend," said O'Brien, who cites several cases of teenagers requiring emergency treatment for parasitic or bacterial eye infections contracted when they shared costume contact lenses. "We know that bacteria and microorganisms can bind to contact lenses."
