Lens review: ColourVue Crazy Lens Green Dragon

Rawr!

I'm gonna review my first vertical slit lenses and I'm super excited as I've been wanting to try a pair for ages! This kind of lens goes under different names, often with an animal as a reference like cat eyes, lizard eyes or as in this case – dragon eyes. It's often the same base design but with different colors and what I'll show you today is the ColourVue Crazy Lens Green Dragon, let's go!

Base curve: 8.6 mm
Diameter: 14.0 mm

Water content: 45%
Life span: 1 year (I recommend 6 months)

You can tell just by looking at them that what we have on hand is a opaque lens with bright color – there's only three colors present and that's green, yellow and black. The main point of this kind of lenses is to provide you with a vertical pupil, slit eyes, typically seen on reptiles and cats. 

I'm gonna answer the question that everyone is probably asking by now – do they spin? Yes they do, sadly. It is typical of vertical pupil lenses to spin around (and pretty much all lenses tbh, it's just that it's much more noticeable on this type of lenses) and unless they're weighted by some sort of stabilizator then they will inevitably spin around sooner or later, which means that you'll be poking your eyes a lot during the time and looking in mirrors to make sure that your lenses look like they should. It's a bit of a hassle but the amount of spinning seems to be possible to somewhat control by being mindful of how much you move your eyes around etc – I noticed that because I have strabismus that my other lens spun much more (my weaker eye, in particular because it rolls outward when I'm not focused) and much faster than my better eye, so I experimented with trying to only look straight ahead and not moving my gaze around and it seemed on a quick check to affect how long the lenses stayed in position before starting to move. I might be wrong as this was just a 5-10 minute test but that's some food for thought. 

Also, a fair warning already now that, while I've tried to keep the lenses upright on all photos below, it was impossible to make sure that they were always 100% correctly as sometimes a lens would have shifted by the time I put the camera in position to take the photo.

One lens in.

The yellow color turns more greenish on my eyes and the overall perceived brightness gets very slightly diluted, which is cool in a sense as it gives a slightly more natural flair to the lenses, even though they are pretty much as far from a natural human eye as one could possibly get. xD 

The pupil hole is kept transparent to let you see through easily while the rest of the vertical slit is pitch black, this also means that depending on the light conditions your real eye color might show through a bit in the center because our pupils change size in light and darkness. In poorer lights or during night time you'll most likely see colored corners in your vision or blur.

There's a slight enlargement boost but it's not really all that noticeable since no further attention is drawn to the size, there's no darker rim or such to make the edges stand out. I don't know about you but if I was a dragon I'd rather not have massive cutesy moe eyes, lmao. Dragon eye scleras would of course be a different topic altogether.

Lens photos below!
All photos taken by yours truly during an August afternoon with a semi-cloudy sky. All close-up photos are free from color filters and such and that's so that the colors would be as true to real life as possible.

Natural indoors room light.

Yellow indoors room light.

Flash photo.

Facing window. (shadow side)

Outdoors, back against sun. (facing wall)

Outdoors, facing the sun while being under a harsh shadow.

Outdoors, facing sun.

I noticed nothing wrong with the comfort. They are fine to wear and there's no apparent stinging, scratching, red eyes or whatnot. They feel thin enough to not really be noticeable when worn but, as already mentioned above, beware of colored corners in poorer light conditions. I'd say average wearing time for me is anything around 2-5 hours, which would probably equal about 4-8 hours for someone who does not have ridiculously dry eyes like me. All eyes are different so it's really difficult to give wearing time estimates as comfort is highly subjective and depends on many factors.

I think it's a really fun lens and I'd definitely use them more if I didn't have to constantly worry about if they are positioned correctly while at a con or such as yeah, I get anxious for even the smallest things and derpy eyes would be a part of that list. But if you have no issue with fixing them every now and again then I'd say go for it! I primarily see ColourVue Crazy Lens Green Dragon as a costuming lens for fantasy shootings, live-action roleplay, cosplay and that kind of stuff. You could of course use them for fashion too, assuming you don a style that's... fiery enough, hoho.

Distance photos!

Short summary:

Color: 10/10 

Vibrant, almost poisonous-looking green color. Hard to miss and eye-catching!

Design: 9/10 

Simple two-tone slit pupil lenses that look like advertised. Only minus is that they spin.

Opacity: 9/10

These mask your real eye color completely but aren't 100% exactly as bright when worn.

Enlargement: 3/10 

Smallish, but that's what I want from this kind of lenses.

Comfort: 7/10 

Fine. Nothing major except for colored corners in poorer lights because of natural pupil behavior (dilation). Generally comfortable and pleasant to wear.

Naturalness: 1/10 

Unless dragon eyes are in your books of natural things then no, no no no.

I hope you found this review helpful! Thanks for reading. ^^

Shiro Samurai is out.