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Scientists Debunk Grimes’ Dumb Eyeball Joke

Grimes drew a lot of attention earlier this week after posting on Instagram an obviously sarcastic workout routine involving 45 minutes of stretching, screaming sessions, “astro-gliding” to other dimensions, a sensory deprivation chamber, and sword fighting. Given the pop star’s history of bizarre bits, like writing an augmented reality musical or dating Elon Musk, many professional journalists credulously published the training regiment as news.

The website Salon took the post so seriously as to investigate its most absurd proposition: that Grimes underwent “experimental surgery that removes the top film of my eyeball and replaces it with an orange ultra-flex polymer that my friend and I made in the lab this past winter as a means to cure seasonal depression.” Grimes’ stated goal was to eliminate all blue light from her vision. A Salon reporter interviewed two science experts about the procedure.

Rahul Khurana, clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, said: “There is no legitimate eye surgery available to eliminate blue light, nor a reason to eliminate all blue light.” A cornea researcher at a major university, who declined to be named for some reason, got more nerdy: “There’s decades worth of work trying to come up with a superficially placed contact lens replacement. They’ve all failed, because a material placed in the superficial cornea ultimately starves the underlying cells of nutrients and oxygen leading to corneal haze or scarring and vision loss.”

Glad we got to the bottom of that.