Making Contact

Tattoos are tired.

Piercing is so passe.

But don’t fret, you faddy members of the dare-to-be-different crowd. A hot new form of body art has finally landed in sleepy ol’ Spokane, and it doesn’t involve needles or pain.

They are WildEyes, customized soft contact lenses that will turn your baby blues (or hazel/browns) into something from another planet.

The $99 lenses (plus exam fee) come in a variety of bizarre designs. There are Cat Eyes, eight balls, stars and crescent moons and brimstone red. A model called White-Out covers the iris to give the wearer that “just crawled out of the grave for the weekend” look popular in vampire movies.

Two new models, Alien and Bloodshot, have been released for the pre-Halloween costume buying flurry.

The former turns your peepers into green flying saucers. The latter makes the wearer’s eyes look like Ted Kennedy’s after a weekend bender.

Spokane’s James Fairley, 27, says he wore the Wildfire pattern he bought for Halloween to work one day. The lenses, which turn his eyeballs into a shocking starburst of red and yellow with pinpoint pupils, got a more emotional reaction than he expected.

“Everyone freaked out,” he says.

Which really wasn’t such a good thing, considering Fairley is a food service worker at a mental hospital.< “Some of the patients actually ran from me,” he adds.

Needless to say, Fairley hasn’t done an encore performance. But on Wednesday, he accompanied Heather Erickson, 24, to the Eye Care Team, 126 N. Washington.

After careful consideration, she decided on a pair of Red Hots. The blood-red lenses give her a “demon seed” quality that is intensified by her blond hair.

Fairley and Erickson plan to wear their WildEyes for a Halloween party. He is going as Darth Maul. Her character will be new to the Star Wars saga: Darth Molly.

Roy Mitchell, an optician at the Eye Care Team, was skeptical when the lenses hit the market last year. “I thought nobody would buy them except maybe weird kids, and where are they gonna get the money?”

His opinion has changed. The Eye Care Team has sold at least 35 pairs in both corrected and uncorrected versions.

Most of the sales have been to young adults, although Mitchell says one older man bought a pair of Red Hots to embellish his rather unorthodox Halloween Devil costume.

“His buddy shot an elk,” adds Mitchell, “and he talked the guy into cutting the legs off so he can wear the hooves over his feet.”

Nothing says Halloween hi-jinks like Satan and an amputated elk.

Brad Waggener at the Spokane Eye Clinic, 427 S. Bernard, says the business, which has several locations, has sold about 15 pairs. He sees WildEyes as a gimmick that will get bigger and bigger.

Pretty soon, you won’t be able to get a car loan without dealing with some evil-faced banker with glowing yellow eyes.

Hmm. Bad example. I guess that pretty much describes the average loan officer.

But there will probably be many less-terrifying workers - proctologists, funeral directors, massage therapists - who will wear WildEyes to get a rise out of a client.

Jennifer O’Neill works for the New York public relations firm that promotes WildEyes. She says the popularity of the novelty lenses has been huge since they were introduced in April 1998.

Even O’Neill isn’t above sporting her Cat Eyes while using the city transit system. One day, she says, she fell asleep on a bus with the lenses on.

She eventually woke up and, in a groggy condition, opened her eyes and stared at an elderly woman sitting near her.

“She screamed and screamed,” O’Neill says.

This is the best Halloween innovation since the Nixon mask.