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Posted
Friday, March 25, 2011 12:41 PM
| By
Roxanne Palmer
The late Elizabeth Taylor was
widely known for her violet eyes—so much so that she named her newest fragrance after them. I was slightly crushed,
then, to discover that, by most official accounts,
Taylor's eyes were actually a deep blue that appeared purple when enhanced by lighting and makeup. (Truly violet
eyes occur only in albinos.)
While she might not have had bona fide purple eyes, as
anyone who saw Elizabeth Taylor onscreen knows, they were still arresting: large,
liquid, and framed by a thick fringe of eyelashes. With respect to those
eyelashes, Taylor apparently hit the jackpot, genetically. According to
biographer J. Randy Tarborelli, just after her birth, Taylor's parents were
ushered into the doctor's office and told that their newborn daughter had a mutation:
"Well, that sounded just awful," the girl's mother
later recall[ed], "a mutation.
But, when he explained that her eyes had double rows of eyelashes, I thought,
well, now, that doesn't sound so terrible at all."
Double rows of eyelashes are usually the result of a mutation
at FOXC2, a gene that influences all kinds of
tissue development in embryos. FOXC2 mutations are thought to be responsible
for, among other things, lymphedema-distichiasis
syndrome, a hereditary disease that can cause disorders of the lymphatic
system in addition to double eyelashes.
The eyelash mutation isn't always as cosmetically enhancing as
Taylor's turned out to be—the extra eyelashes can sometimes grow inward and
damage the cornea. And it turns out that 7 percent of people with
lymphedema-distichiasis syndrome also suffer from congenital heart disease.
Taylor herself had a history of heart problems—in 2009, Taylor underwent
surgery to repair a "leaky valve", and her death on Wednesday was attributed to
congestive heart failure.
The late actor Richard Burton, who accounted for two of
Taylor's eight marriages, was oddly dismissive
of her beauty, saying that she had a double chin, an overdeveloped chest, and
short legs. But, he conceded, "she has wonderful eyes."
Special thanks to Dr.
Janet Sparrow and Dr. Stephen Tsang from the Ophthalmology Department at
Columbia University, and to makeup artist Elias Gutierrez.
Photograph of Elizabeth Taylor courtesy of Getty Images.
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