14 DAY TRIAL // Last weekend, Tameka “Tiny” Harris, famous singer, songwriter, reality star and wife of rapper T.I., made countless headlines after posting a photo to her Instagram revealing she had permanently changed her eye color from brown to light blue with the help of iris implants.
The procedure is known as BrightOcular and is illegal in the US for cosmetic purposes. This probably explained why Tiny had the photo removed shortly after posting it, amid uproar that she was practically endorsing a very risky, non FDA-approved surgical intervention.
Well, she’s now speaking out to defend herself.
Procedure was done in Africa, was painless and risk-free
Tiny talked to ABC’s Good Morning America about the procedure, while also happily showing off her “new” eyes: they are indeed a light blue, which she calls ice blue, and she says she loves them.
Video of her interview is available below, at the end of the article.
Tiny explains that she had to travel all the way to Africa to get the iris implants, because of the lack of FDA approval in the states. Even though research is still being done on the long-term effects of the intervention, she’s not afraid.
Not even the immediate side-effects, which range from glaucoma to blindness, could scare her off getting it done. She explains that doctors made a little “slit” through which they inserted the light blue-colored implant, which was folded. They then spread it over the eye, covering her naturally brown iris – and she was out of the surgery room in about 20 minutes, 10 minutes for each peeper.
“They told me that the procedure was going to be quick, five to 10 minutes an eye. They woke me up. It was very blurry, then it kind of fades in,” she explains. She has been experiencing absolutely no vision problems since the intervention so, as far as she’s concerned, it was entirely as doctors told her it would be: painless and risk-free.
Tiny is happy with the results, so what is it to us that she had the procedure done?
One reason for which Tiny got so much media attention when word first got out that she’d changed her eye color permanently was the fact that she’s someone people look up to, whether she likes it or not, whether she owns it or not.
To her fans, she is a role model, someone they wish to emulate whenever possible. By getting the procedure done and then boasting about it on social media, she was practically giving them something more to emulate – this in a context in which the procedure is non-FDA approved, illegal and considered too risky to be worth it for cosmetic purposes.
Tiny’s response to this on GMA is simple: if she’s happy with the results and she has been given every guarantee that what she’s doing is not healthy, who are we to take offense with it? This is her body and she’s willing to dispose of it as she sees fit.
So, if she wants to change the color of her eyes from brown to blue, if she has experienced no side effects and if her husband is thrilled with how she looks, why should she not do it? Why should she care about what people have to say?
The answer is, obviously, that she doesn’t.
