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“OTC eye drops, like artificial tears, may supplement tear film temporarily, but they do not treat the underlying cause of dry eye,” explains Ragha. So, you might find yourself reaching for those drops every hour, which can be tedious, Ragha points out. Many OTC products also have preservatives, which can cause eye irritation if you use them too often, according to Orr.
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The spooky season is upon us, and it’s time to put together those Halloween costumes. If you’re dressing up as a vampire, a zombie, or a creepy skull, then you’re likely in the market for colored contact lenses to elevate your look. But before you add those bloody red contacts to your cart, be sure they won’t result in a real scare later on.
Novelty contact lenses can be an extreme risk, leading to severe irritation or discomfort, eye infections, and sometimes even vision impairment or blindness, experts have warned. In order to avoid those risks, there are a few things to keep in mind when buying novelty contact lenses.
Halloween costumes are worn once a year, so people typically tend not to splurge on those gnarly fits. Even if your costume is cheap (I’m not judging), make sure those contacts aren’t.
As Halloween approaches, novelty contact lenses are sold all over the internet and at costume stores. However, it’s best to purchase contact lenses at a reputable store that’s more likely to have been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
If you can’t buy contact lenses from your eye doctor, then look for a reliable online retailer that requires a prescription. Previous studies have found that over-the-counter cosmetic lenses contain chlorine and other harmful chemicals used for tint or color, which can lead to infections. These infections can sometimes lead to more serious issues such as vision impairment, cataracts, and secondary glaucoma.
Researchers also warn that the colorants used for novelty contacts create an uneven texture, which can scratch your eyes and increase the risk of infections that may lead to blindness, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Also, since the contact lenses are not fitted to your eyes, they can lead to scarring, corneal abrasions, and ulcers.
If you’re using contact lenses for the first time, do not store them in water but instead keep them in a clean case filled with a specialized solution for disinfection. You should also not store them for an extended period of time, and make sure you clean out the case periodically.
There’s also this handy guide on how to wear contacts safely. With all that in mind, make sure the only scare you get on Halloween is from the gruesome outfits and not the safety of your eyes.
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Passant Rabie
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Targeting aging concerns takes a holistic approach. You can use all the appropriate topical ingredients, and yet, if you’re not taking care of yourself as a whole, you’re not going to see the full results. You need to give your body the appropriate building blocks to create healthy, nourished skin—such as amino acids, vitamins, minerals, lipids, and antioxidants.
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If you grew up believing carrots would one day bring you superhuman vision, I’m here to tell you: Your parents are liars. That little fib was merely a tactic to get you to eat your veggies, and now that we’re all adults, functional eye doctor Rudrani Banik, M.D., wants to set things straight.
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Scientists at Mass Eye and Ear are winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for their research and development of an experimental stem cell therapy for severely, and supposedly permanently, injured corneas.
Can stem cells help repair previously untreatable eye injuries?
In a small trial of 14 patients published this March, the researchers showed it was possible to take stem cells from a person’s healthy eye and use them to safely replenish the surface of their other severely damaged cornea.
18 months after the procedure, nearly all of the patients continued to show at least a partial response to the treatment and saw their vision improve, while two-thirds experienced a complete restoration of their corneal surface. No severe side effects related to the treatment were reported.
When our cornea—the transparent outer layer of the eye—is harmed by injury or infection, doctors often treat it by transplanting healthy corneal tissue from a donor, also known as a corneal graft. But sometimes, an injury is so damaging that it also wipes away the cornea’s limited supply of surface stem cells, also called limbal epithelial cells. Without these cells, people will experience symptoms like itching, pain, whitened corneas, and eventually loss of vision.
The team’s approach harvests corneal stem cells from the person’s healthy eye and grows them in the lab. These cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cells (CALEC) are then packaged onto a cellular tissue graft that’s transplanted to the other eye.
“Corneal stem cell deficiency is really one of the most common causes of blindness worldwide. These stem cells create a healthy corneal epithelial cell layer, and that is compatible with good vision and no pain and just having a comfortable eye when you blink,” project leader Ula Jurkunas, associate director of the Cornea Service at Mass Eye and Ear, told Gizmodo. “And therefore, we developed this kind of stem cell therapy in response to an unmet medical need for stem cell deficiency and corneal blindness.”
There is no highly effective treatment for the most severe cases of limbal stem cell deficiency, according to Jurkunas. So CALEC could offer hope to many people who otherwise had no options. And since it uses a person’s own adult stem cells, there’s no worry about the body rejecting the transplant or other ethical considerations commonly brought up with using embryonic stem cells.
But more than just that, it’s breaking new ground in the world of stem cell medicine. According to the researchers, this is the first stem cell therapy of its kind in the U.S. to be used in the eye. For decades, scientists have been studying stem cells as a possible treatment for all sorts of irreversible injuries. CALEC and similar therapies could very well become some of the first bona fide examples of this approach working as intended.
Jurkunas and her team are now in discussion with the Food and Drug Administration regarding CALEC’s approval, which may require additional data from a larger trial conducted across multiple research sites. They’re also in talks with potential commercial partners to license the therapy and help fund further development, including a new trial if needed.
Outside of that, the team is still working to improve the shelf life and manufacturing of CALEC cells, which will be important to ensuring that the therapy can be shipped over longer distances.
Jurkunas first started working on the research that gave rise to CALEC as a junior scientist in 2006, nearly 20 years ago. And while the team may bring on commercial partners for the final leg of development, CALEC’s current journey from the lab bench to the bedside has notably been made without any pharmaceutical funding. It has required the collaboration of many other researchers, however, including the scientists in Japan who initially helped Jurkunas learn how to better grow stem cells in the lab.
“It’s taken an enormous amount of study research staff. And then there’s the physician collaborators, Reza Dana, Jia Yin, Lynette Johns; they were the main investigators in the [March 2025] study,” Jurkunas said. “And that’s Mass Eye and Ear only. Then we have Boston Children’s Hospital; we have Dana Farber; we have the JAEB Center, which is our [Contract Research Organization] that helped us with data analysis and management and all the things that you have to do to make sure the data is intact.”
Jurkunas also pointed out that CALEC would have never come to fruition without the federal funding provided by the National Institutes of Health and the National Eye Institute—the same sort of funding that’s now being endangered by the current Trump administration.
“I want to just remind people that the NIH does support medically transformative therapies that are de novo, they’re new,” she said. “We think of them, we work on them, and we develop them.”
Click here to see all of the winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair.
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Ed Cara
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Beauty & Health Editor
Hannah Frye is the Beauty & Health Editor at mindbodygreen. She has a B.S. in journalism and a minor in women’s, gender, and queer studies from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Hannah has written across lifestyle sections including beauty, women’s health, mental health, sustainability, social media trends, and more. She previously worked for Almost 30, a top-rated health and wellness podcast. In her current role, Hannah reports on the latest beauty trends and innovations, women’s health research, brain health news, and plenty more.
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The place I struggle with the most is around my eyes. On any given day, I deal with everything from morning-time puffy eyelids to dark undereye circles to crow’s feet to sagging. So I am always looking for solutions to keep my eyes looking lifted, smooth, and bright. On the other hand, the eye area is famously delicate and fragile, so it’s important to treat the area appropriately. This puts me in a tough position: I want effective solutions but need them to be gentle so as to not incur damage in the process.
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Ketogenic diets are put to the test for diabetes reversal.
As you can see at the start of my video Does a Ketogenic Diet Help Diabetes or Make It Worse?, ketogenic diets can lower blood sugars better than conventional diets. So much so, in fact, that there is a keto product company that claims ketogenic diets can “reverse” diabetes. However, they are confusing the symptom (high blood sugars) with the disease (carbohydrate intolerance). People with diabetes can’t properly handle carbohydrates, and this manifests as high blood sugars. Clearly, if you stick to eating mostly fat, your blood sugars will stay low, but you may be actually making the underlying disease worse at the same time.
We’ve known for nearly a century that if you put people on a ketogenic diet, their carbohydrate intolerance can skyrocket within just two days. Below and at 0:46 in my video, you can see a graph from the study showing the blood sugar response two days after eating sugar. On a high-carb diet, blood sugar response is about 90 mg/dL. But, the blood sugar response to the same amount of sugar after a high-fat diet is about 190 mg/dL, nearly double. The intolerance to carbohydrates skyrocketed on a high-fat diet.
After one week on an 80 percent fat diet, you can quintuple your blood sugar spike in reaction to the same carb load compared to a week on a low-fat diet, as you can see in the graph below and at 1:12 in my video. 
Even a single day of excessive dietary fat intake can do it, as you can see in the graph below and at 1:26 in my video. If you’re going in for a diabetes test, having a fatty dinner the night before can adversely affect your results. Just one meal high in saturated fat can make carbohydrate intolerance, the cause of diabetes, worse within four hours.
Given enough weight loss by any means, whether from cholera or bariatric surgery, type 2 diabetes can be reversed, but a keto diet for diabetes may not just be papering over the cracks, but actively throwing fuel on the fire.
I’ve been trying to think of a good metaphor. It’s easy to come up with things that just treat the symptoms without helping the underlying disease, like giving someone with pneumonia aspirin for their fever instead of antibiotics. However, a keto diet for diabetes is worse than that because it may treat the symptoms while actively worsening the disease. It may be more like curing the fever by throwing that pneumonia patient out into a snow bank or “curing” your amputated finger by amputating your hand. One of the co-founders of masteringdiabetes.org suggested it’s like a CEO who makes their bad bottom line look better by borrowing tons of cash. The outward numbers look better, but on the inside, the company is just digging itself into a bigger hole.
Do you remember The Club, that popular car anti-theft device that attaches to the steering wheel and locks it in place so the steering column can only turn a few inches? Imagine you’re in a car at the top of a hill with the steering wheel locked. Then, the car starts rolling down the hill. What do you do? Imagine there’s also something stuck under your brake pedal. The keto-diet equivalent response to this situation is who cares if you’re barreling down into traffic with a locked steering wheel and no brakes—just stick to really straight deserted roads without any stop signs or traffic lights. If you do that, problem solved! The longer you go, the more speed you’ll pick up. If you should hit a dietary bump in the road or start to veer off the path, the consequences could get more and more disastrous over time. However, if you stick to the keto straight and narrow, you’ll be a-okay! In contrast, the non-keto response would be to just unlock the steering wheel and dislodge whatever’s under your brake. In other words, fix the underlying problem instead of just whistling past—and then into—the graveyard.
The reason keto proponents claim they can “reverse” diabetes is they can successfully wean type 2 diabetics off their insulin. That’s like faith-healing someone out of the need for a wheelchair by making them stay in bed the rest of their life. No need for a wheelchair if you never move. Their carbohydrate intolerance isn’t gone. Their diabetes isn’t gone. In fact, it could be just as bad or even worse. Type 2 diabetes is reversed when you are weaned off insulin while eating a normal diet like everyone else. Then and only then do you not have diabetes anymore. A true diabetes reversal diet, as you can see below and at 4:58 in my video, is practically the opposite of a ketogenic diet: getting diabetics off their insulin within a matter of weeks by eating more than 300 grams of carbs a day! 
The irony doesn’t stop there. One of the reasons people with diabetes suffer such nerve and artery damage is due to an inflammatory metabolic toxin known as methylglyoxal, which forms at high blood sugar levels. Methylglyoxal is the most potent creator of advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which are implicated in degenerative diseases—from Alzheimer’s and cataracts to kidney disease and strokes, as you can see below and at 5:31 in my video.
You get AGEs in your body from two sources: You can eat them preformed in your diet or make them internally from methylglyoxal if you have high blood sugar levels. On a keto diet, one would expect high exposure to preformed AGEs, since they’re found concentrated in animal-derived foods high in fat and protein, but we would expect less internal, new formation due to presumably low levels of methylglyoxal, given lower blood sugars from not eating carbs. Dartmouth researchers were surprised to find more methylglyoxal! As shown in the graph below and at 6:11 in my video, a few weeks on the Atkins diet led to a significant increase in methylglyoxal levels. Those in active ketosis did even worse, doubling the level of this glycotoxin in their bloodstream.
It turns out that high sugars may not be the only way to create this toxin, as you can see below and at 6:24 in my video. One of the ketones you make on a ketogenic diet is acetone (known for its starring role in nail polish remover). Acetone does more than just make keto dieters fail breathalyzer tests, “feel queasy and light-headed, and develop what’s been described as ‘rotten apple breath.’” Acetone can oxidize in the blood to form acetol, which may be a precursor for methylglyoxal. 
That may be why keto dieters can end up with levels of this glycotoxin as high as those with out-of-control diabetes, which can cause the nerve damage and blood vessel damage you see in diabetics. That’s another way keto dieters can end up with a heart attack. The irony of treating diabetes with a ketogenic diet may extend beyond just making the underlying diabetes worse, but by mimicking some of the disease’s dire consequences.
This is part of a seven-video series on keto, which you can find in related videos below.
I also recently tackled diabetes.
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Michael Greger M.D. FACLM
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So, what are the best ways to support eye health daily? According to integrative optometrist Marina Gurvich, OD “eye diseases occur due to a combination of genetics, oxidative stress, and inflammation.” She recommends wearing sunglasses during the day and blue-light-blocking glasses at night, exercising regularly, avoiding harsh products when washing your face, and getting plenty of sleep in the name of eye health.
Eating a healthy diet and supplementing can also pay off for your eye health. Eating a Mediterranean-style diet seems to be most helpful for preventing ocular disease, says Gurvich, while supplements that have been shown to protect the eyes include maqui berry, lutein and astaxanthin, and omega-3s.
Finally, tending to your overall health will also support your eyes. Chronic health conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease can contribute to vision impairment—as does smoking and physical inactivity, the CDC warns. So your eye health doesn’t start and stop with the obvious prevention methods.
More than anything, be sure to speak with your doctor if you’re concerned about your vision. If you have a current prescription that doesn’t work as well as it used to, stay on top of getting it updated.
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Hannah Frye
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In a recent TikTok video, optometrist Carly Rose, O.D., explains why using eye drops (originally posted by content creator Bree Martin) just might work for inflamed pimples, too.
The viral hack is quite simple: You squeeze some eye drops onto a cotton swab, hold it against your pimple (don’t rub it, or that may cause irritation), and watch the redness fade. Both creators use the Lumify Redness Reliever Eye Drops, which I also personally swear by.
“Of course this is going to work—brimonidine [an active ingredient in eye drops] is a vasoconstrictor,” Rose says, which means it helps to narrow blood vessels; this, in turn, will reduce redness.
“Pimples tend to have more relaxed blood vessels and inflammation, which make them appear red,” board-certified dermatologist at Schweiger Dermatology Group Nava Greenfield, M.D., FAAD, tells mbg. By constricting the blood vessels, you can effectively dial down that inflammation.
However, Greenfield notes that this hack does actually treat the pimple itself. “It can temporarily improve the appearance of the pimple but is not really helping the pimple resolve,” she notes.
Also, it’s not something you should be doing every single day, or the effects might dwindle over time. “It is theoretically possible to have a sort of tachyphylaxis occurring after the active ingredient wears off, and the lesion may appear more red,” Greenfield says. (Meaning, your skin may get used to the active after a few rounds.)
All of this to say: If you have a super-red pimple pop up right before a big event, this eye drop hack will help reduce the redness momentarily. Keep the eye drops with you in case the redness comes back, but don’t make it a regular step in your skin care routine.
Lastly, focus on treating the pimple with tried-and-true methods, like salicylic acid spot treatments—here are some of our favorite acne treatments to help you out.
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Hannah Frye
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“The reason why this works is because, typically, bronzers are warm, and the warmth of a bronzer is going to counteract any blue—aka, dark circles—around the eyes,” Hughes explains. Essentially, think of a warm-toned bronzer as an under-eye color corrector: The former contains orange under-tones that neutralize any cool blue hues.
That’s actually the main difference between bronzer and contour; while both can bring definition to the face, contouring formulas tend to read much more cool-toned. So make sure you do have a proper bronzer before tapping it into your under-eyes, as a contour will only exacerbate any shadows.
Hughes uses the Rose Inc Solar Infusion Soft-Focus Cream Bronzer in the shade Seychelles, but feel free to scroll through this list of favorites to find a formula you love. Saie’s Sun Melt would also be a gorgeous option to try. Regardless, you may want to choose a cream product over powder since you’ll be using it in place of concealer.
On that note, you totally can layer a concealer over your bronzer for a brighter look, or you can stick to a bronzer-only application. The latter is perfect for days when you just want a bit of oomph, but even if you do apply concealer, it will still appear pretty natural.
Hughes swipes her go-to formula on her inner and outer eye corners, then stipples it in with a fluffy concealer brush. “Pat in [the formula] because you don’t want to merge the concealer too much with that bronzer,” she notes. “You want them to be sitting on top of one another.”
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Jamie Schneider
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“The eyes are the window to our brains, and together they create our visual circuitry via a beautifully intricate network of photoreceptors, neurons, blood vessels, muscles, and more. Our eyes are also an oft-neglected organ when it comes to daily health practices. In this world of near-focus excess (prolonged computer use, phones close to our face, etc.), our eyes are experiencing burnout, and visual longevity is at stake. That’s why the eye-critical plant nutrients in mbg’s eye health+ supplement excite me: Not only do all five bioactives support multiple dimensions of ocular function and health, but they’re also sourced from premium botanicals: sustainable algae, marigold flowers, saffron flower, and Patagonian maqui berry.”*
—Ilene Ruhoy, M.D., Ph.D., board-certified neurologist & environmental toxicologist
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Morgan Chamberlain
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