Of all the strange outfits and accessories Lady Gaga wore in her “Bad Romance” video, who would have guessed that the look that would catch fire would be the huge anime-style eyes she flashed in the bathtub?

Lady Gaga’s wider-than-life eyes were computer-generated, but teenagers and young women nationwide have been copying them with special contact lenses imported from Asia.

Known as circle lenses, these are colored contacts — sometimes in weird shades like violet and pink— that make the eyes appear larger because they cover not just the iris, as normal lenses do, but also part of the whites.

Kristin Rowland wears purple circle lenses at a bagel shop in New York. Teenagers and young women nationwide have been copying Lady Gaga’s wider-than-life eyes in her”Bad Romance” video.
Donna Alberico/The New York Times

“I’ve noticed a lot of girls in my town have started to wear them a lot,” said Melody Vue, a 16-year-old in Morganton, N.C., who owns 22 pairs and wears them regularly. She said her friends tended to wear circle lenses for their Facebook photos.

These lenses might be just another beauty fad if not for the facts that they are contraband and that eye doctors express grave concern about them. It is illegal in the United States to sell any contact lenses — corrective or cosmetic — without a prescription, and no major maker of contact lenses in the United States sells circle lenses.

Available online

Yet the lenses are widely available online, typically for $20 to $30 a pair, both in prescription strengths and purely decorative. On message boards and in YouTube videos, young women and teenage girls have been spreading the word about where to buy them.

Waco optometrist Stacie Layne Virden said she hasn’t had any patients ask about circle lenses yet, But the back-to-school rush is just around the corner, and she expects to hear about them then.

Virden, the immediate past-president of the Texas Optometric Association, said some serious risk comes with fashion eyewear such as circle lenses.

“People who wear any type of contact lenses without medical guidance and without a proper fitting put themselves at risk for serious, even blinding, eye infections. A complete evaluation ensures that patient’s eyes are healthy enough for contact lens wear to begin with and routine follow-up exams guarantee that the lenses are not causing long-term damage to the eyes,” she said.

The circle lenses give wearers a childlike, doe-eyed appearance. The look is characteristic of Japanese anime and is also popular in Korea.

Now that circle lenses have gone mainstream in Japan, Singapore and South Korea, they are turning up in American high schools and on college campuses. “In the past year, there’s been a sharp increase in interest here in the U.S.,” said Joyce Kim, a founder of Soompi.com, an Asian pop fan site with a forum devoted to circle lenses. “Once early adopters have adequately posted about it, discussed it and reviewed them, it’s now available to everyone.”

Kim, who lives in San Francisco and is 31, said that some friends her age wear circle lenses almost every day. “It’s like wearing mascara or eyeliner,” she said.

No prescription needed

Sites that sell contact lenses approved by the Food and Drug Administration are supposed to verify customers’ prescriptions with their eye doctors. By contrast, circle lens websites allow customers to choose the strength of their lenses as freely as their color.

Waco optometrist Virden said risks associated with use of decorative contact lenses include conjunctivitis, swelling, allergic reactions and corneal abrasion because of poorly fitting lenses. Other problems may stem from improper care, cleaning and storage of the lenses.

Lady Gaga started a fashion trend with the look of her eyes in the “Bad Romance” video.

Nina Nguyen, a 19-year-old Rutgers student from Bridgewater, N.J., said she was wary at first.

“Our eyes are precious,” she said. “I wasn’t going to put any type of thing in my eyes.”

But after she saw how many students at Rutgers had circle lenses — and the groundswell of users online — she relented. Now she describes herself as “a circle lens addict.”

A makeup artist named Michelle Phan introduced many Americans to circle lenses through a video tutorial on YouTube, where she demonstrates how to get “crazy, googly Lady Gaga eyes.” Phan’s video called “Lady Gaga Bad Romance Look,” has been viewed more than 9.4 million times.

“In Asia, it’s all about the eyes in makeup,” said Phan, a Vietnamese-American blogger who is now Lancome’s first video makeup artist. “They like the whole innocent doll-like look, almost like anime.”

These days girls of many races are embracing the look. “Circle lenses are not just for Asian people” said Crystal Ezeoke, 17, a second-generation Nigerian from Lewisville, Texas. In videos she posts to YouTube, Ezeoke’s gray lenses make her eyes look an otherworldly blue.

Girls like Vue, the 16-year-old in North Carolina, help steer customers to sites where circle lenses are sold. She has posted 13 reviews of circle lenses on YouTube, enough to merit her a coupon code at tokioshine.com, which gives her viewers 10 percent off.

Staff writer Wendy Gragg contributed to this story.