Old time hair dye: did it make your eyes change color?

[meowpossum]

Reading a book for teenaged girls, written in the early 1920’s (Jane Allen:Center) I came across the following nugget:

“Her hair was no longer any relation to yellow, but glowed a rich golden brown like early chestnuts… Her deep uncertain eyes, now blue and then yellow, movie eyes as Meta Noon called them, were surely changing tone. Every experimenter knows hair dye afflicts the blood in color changes, affecting the eyes disastrously. Also, but it seems unkind to suggest such a catastrophe, hair-dye has an immediate action on the sight. Cicely Weldon could not tell time last year after one trip to New York where her hair was ‘fixed up.’”

:eek:

Did hair dyes in the 1920’s really cause temporary blindness and make the eyes change color? Or is this one of those lies people tell kinds in order to dissuade them from doing something socially unacceptible? (you know, like that other thing they used to warn you you’d go blind if you did…)

Also, the eyes actually changed color? I’m assuming that this refers to the whites of the eyes only?

[gotpasswords]

I can certainly see how hair dye could affect vision if it got into the eyes, but to change the color of the eyes? Rubbish. Sounds like that writer had an agenda of scaring girls off the idea of changing the color of their hair.

[liirogue]

The idea of it changing eye color is far-fetched. For instance, one of the experiments that Nazis performed on twins were attempts to change eye color. I don’t believe any were successful, though there were some nasty complications.