An eye for business

Liu needed to see pictures of their eyes first, but some were embarrassed to send her the photos.

"They worried that I would be intimidated. Some of them had atrophied eyes, some of their eyes were removed and some had pupils that had turned blue, which are all quite common conditions for people with a single working eye," she says, adding that the consultations became more of a process to get them to open up.

She has received many letters of thanks from her clients and their families, many of which have moved her, and she says that she is glad to see them find their way back into society with confidence.

Shi Bochong, 28, who had an accident 20 years ago that caused him to lose the sight in his right eye, saw Liu's videos on Douyin in November and immediately decided to contact her about making him a prosthetic eye.

"I was excited when I saw that her artificial eye could move with the other eye and that it looked quite natural," Shi recalls. He got his family's support and flew to Beijing to meet Liu and get his prosthetic eye made.

His right eye has been half-closed for the past two decades and the moment the artificial eye was implanted, both his eyes opened. "I feel so happy, and so does my family, they made a video call to Liu to thank her," Shi says.

Shi says he is an optimistic man and he likes to take photos and videos, even though he was unable to open his right eye before. With the new prosthetic eye, he says that he feels more confident and looks in the mirror more often.

"People around me say that I have become more handsome and energetic," he says.

For Liu, one advantage of being an ocularist is to achieve a kind of freedom of expression with her prosthetic eyes. She now has around a dozen, each with a different pattern, or that can light up in different colors. She describes them as "large cosmetic contact lenses".

A customized prosthetic eye costs around 6,943 yuan ($1,000), which is a bit of a burden for some families, so Liu launched a charity event, through which she is making 10 prosthetic eyes for free to help people that are burdened with financial difficulties.

Liu read in the news that there are currently around 5 million people with monocular vision impairment in China, so she plans to open more branches of her business in other cities, such as Shanghai and Guangdong's Guangzhou, so that some of her clients won't have to travel as far.

She says that she also hopes to further improve her skills by studying abroad, so that she can make better prosthetics to help more people.

Contact the writer at liyingxue@chinadaily.com.cn