It was harder to implant than he thought it would be," Chynn said of the California surgeon's attempt.
"I've been following eye-jewelry for a while," he said. "I'm very America-loyal [and] whenever I see something abroad that's being done that's not being done in the U.S., I'm always kind of like, 'We shouldn't be behind in anything.'"
Chynn recently traveled to the Netherlands to learn from an eye-jewelry surgeon who performed hundreds of the implants. Eye-jewelry became a minor fad in Europe a few years ago.
Chynn, who studied at Columbia, Dartmouth, Emory and Harvard, says eye-jewelry implants may yield academic and medical fruits.
For example, Chynn says, gold is often used to weigh down the eyelids of people who cannot close their eyes naturally. It's possible, he said, that platinum would be a superior metal for the job, because it may be more inert and has a greater density.
"I don't want this to be seen as a totally cosmetic, not important, superficial thing," Chynn said. "We're only doing these things to show the world it's safe. There are always ancillary benefits – just like there's a lot of stuff with NASA that trickles down to the rest of the population."
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Other eye experts, however, view eye-jewelry implants with alarm.
Philip Rizzuto, secretary for communications at the American Academy of Ophthalmology, told U.S. News the jewelry "could be potentially blinding."
Rizzuto, a trauma surgeon who teaches at Brown University's medical school, says "one of the significant risks is what's known as a sub-conjunctival hemorrhage or bleeding under the clear conjunctiva, the Saran Wrap of the eye."
"You have to get it to stay somehow," he says. "It's probably flat so it has an edge and that can move and that can damage the eye and that can cut the eye, it would stand to reason.