Windows of replacement of the soul

FA thousand years ago, a woman had a very sophisticated artificial eye that she was probably wearing while she was alive. It was perhaps made of natural tar and animal fat or perhaps bitumen paste; It had a golden surface and a central circle where the iris would be, with radiant lines outside, similar to a sun. The gold threads inside the eye imitated the capillaries. Archaeologists discovered this element in 2006 during a excavation by Shahr-E Sukhteh, otherwise known as Burnt City, in what is now southeast Iran. The woman was six feet high and about 30 years old when she died. The prosthesis was in its left obstacle.

An even older eye was found in a skeleton in Spain. He was estimated at 7,000 years. However, it could not have been comfortably worn and was placed back in the catch, probably after the death of the man.

Eye manufacturers for millennia have therefore tried to recreate the expressionist power of one of the most complex and significant organs of the human body.

The ocularists are almost as rare as astronauts.

Artificial eyes stories tend to start with the ancient Egyptians, who were good enough to make eyes for mummies. They “withdrew the eyes of the dead, poured from wax or plaster in the orbits, then inserted precious stones to simulate iris”, in history. But they were not so sophisticated in their techniques for the living: a piece of clay the waist of the painted eyes to look like an eye and then fixed on the socket with a piece of flesh -colored fabric. These stories generally jump over the centuries – in the mid -1500s – before describing any real progress, in particular in the conception of an ocular prosthesis intended to integrate into the catch rather than it.

The French military surgeon of the 16th century, Ambrobise Pare, is often considered the first to describe the replacement eyes used at the time, although he did not claim to have invented them. One was a metallic prosthesis – perhaps gold – headed under the eyelids to cover a narrowed eye. Péré called this type of eye a “hyplepharon”. For someone whose evil eye has not been narrowed and therefore left room for something else in the catch, there was an “ekblepheron”: a steel spring which wrapped around the head and widen in an oval surface at the front. The oval was covered with leather and painted with the image of an eye and eyelids. Unsurprisingly, the two types were clumsy and uncomfortable, and neither has created much or an illusion of reality. Few people wore either.

Later in the 16th century, the Glassmakers of Murano of Venice introduced the glass eyes: thin and fragile shells not much more comfortable, by accounts, than metal objects. Nevertheless, the Venetian eyes were the best that a borgne person could obtain for more than a century. Even when Paris became the dominant source of the prosthetic eyes at the beginning of the 19th century – there was porcelain – the product was often disappointing. “Very lower articles”, an article in 1856 on new developments in the design of the eyes called these previous eyes. They consisted of “an oval shell, exactly like half of a bird’s egg”. They “only varied the size and the color, the same room being used for the left and right side.” Such a primitive and simplistic design “gave carriers a lot of pain, has produced an effect of gaze and conferred on the face a repellant aspect”.

I learned the ancient artificial eyes during a gathering of contemporary eye manufacturers in 2023 in Las Vegas. A woman named Emily Brunson, who was in the middle of her five -year learning to become a professional eye, made a presentation. The room was filled with eyes manufacturers who seemed to appreciate the deeply historical roots of their work.

Today, we call professional eye tinters. They work in a field called ocularistry. They are not doctors. They have a variety of horizons: sometimes sculpture or painting, sometimes medical illustration, sometimes special, the artistic talent of makeup, sometimes something completely unrelated to eye manufacturing. Most often, they are self -employed workers, owners of their own small businesses or work for an independent occupant. Almost always, you will find their offices in medical parks alongside those of orthodontists, veterinarians, optometrists, urologists, allergists, dermatologists. Sometimes they will be in brick buildings by themselves on arteries near shopping centers and fast food restaurants or on the sixth floor of a building in the city center. Several times, an eyepiece will belong to a family with generations of ocularists, the oldest teaching at the youngest, the company has passed as an inheritance. You can find third generation and even fifth generation ocularists.

They do not fall out of catches and do not roll on the floors because they are not round.

And yet, the ocularists are almost as rare as astronauts. Less than 200 certified ocularists disperse across the United States. The most populated states (California, New York, Texas) could have a dozen each, and more rural states (Utah, Kansas, Vermont) could have one, perhaps two, sometimes none. All over the world, their number is just as small, even much smaller. In India, for example, for a population of 1.4 billion inhabitants, there are only three dozen ocularists.

The eyes that ocularists do now are not like that belonging to the woman of the city burned, and they are certainly not like those of certain representations of common popular culture. For example, they do not fall, as in certain caricatures and films, get out of the catches and roll on the floors, horribly those whose feet they rumble because they are not round. They are not in transparent plastic, filled with circuits, spatial age and simultaneous age, such as the “bion of visual bionic” by The man of six million dollars. This device, we learn from the intro of the show, when Steve Austin is rebuilt after having barely survived a crash of its test plan, connects by a cord directly behind in its occipital lobe. No.

Neither a “glass eye”, most of the time, even glass. The dominant material these days is acrylic, although the glass eyes are still in progress.

More importantly, perhaps, the eyes that ocularists do not yet restore the vision, especially not with a zoom ratio from 20.2 to 1, like the Bionic eye of Austin. They could one day do it and scientists took small steps in this direction. For the moment, however, the function of a prosthetic eye is much less physiological than it is artistic. It is intended not to create a vision but to create the illusion, not to see but to shape the way in which its carrier is seen.

There are two reasons why most people know little about the prosthetic eyes or where they come from. First of all, there are this small number of eyes manufacturers. Second, if a prosthetic eye is made to be as realistic as possible and well, nobody will know that there is. The objective of the ocularists is not To draw attention to their work. (There are exceptions for people who want “fun” eyes – open openness with sports logos or a heart or almost everything that can be painted on a small space.)

SOon After having my own prosthetic eye in 2009, a grocery cashier said: “You have the most beautiful blue eyes”, and I thanked it and asked if it could say which was real. I was still in the initial euphoria to have the gift of the eye, and I couldn’t help praising myself, even if she had no idea what I was talking about, and she seemed only a little less confused when I caught my finger against my eye so that she could hear the click.

My experience with the eye was that of intimacy and gratitude. Visits to my ocularist from the creation of my eye – which took two days – through each annual polishing was long stretches of attention and personal care which seem increasingly rare in a medical world of high volume, crazy insurance regulations and systemic stress. Perhaps the extended visual contact required is a great reason for that. It is perhaps the fact that hand manufacturing and hand painting take hours. It is perhaps that the profession asks his practitioners to use not only their technical and artistic skills, but also their listening and empathy skills. My eyepiece told me that his business was “probably 75% of psychology and 25% a real product that I do”. The healing to which an artificial eye contributes is never just aesthetic.

The expressive power of real eyes can be frustrating and elusive in the manufacture of an artificial eye. Damage to an obstacle – an accident, a fire, a cancer – are sometimes so extensive that an ocularist cannot reach harmony and complete symmetry and what seems in the best cases like magic.

However, magic often occurs.

I spent years trying to understand how this magic occurs – why people have tried to reproduce their eyes lost for millennia, and how, for someone who is missing or overwhelmed by a designator, an artificial and generously given artificial eye can help heal. Not by restoring a perfect function, but by softening the trauma that affects the very heart of a person’s identity.

This article is suitable for Hand eyes: art and healing prostheses,, by Dan Roche, and has been reprinted with the permission of With Press Reader.

Image of lead: Exvoto78 / Shutterstock

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  Published on August 7, 2025

  Dan Roche is the author of Love works,, High waitAnd Eyes. He teaches creative writing, journalism and literature at Le Moyne College, in Syracuse, NY.