‘They burned into my eye’: Elle Fanning shares scary if medically impossible on-set story from ‘The Neon Demon’

You know how sometimes when you tell a story or tell someone your height on a dating app, you usually lie? The severity of the lie is what makes it believable or not, and Elle Fanning recently told a story about contacts melting in her eyes that seems pretty hard to believe. I’m not a doctor, but still.

Fanning and Jenna Ortega recently interviewed each other for a piece in Variety, and they got to talking about how Ortega’s character in the hit Netflix show Wednesday never blinks.

“… I think that I look like a pug. I was like, ‘What could make me more intimidating? I should never move and I should stare at people really intensely, and maybe that will work.'”

This jogged Fanning’s memory about The Neon Demon, a 2016 horror film about youth, modeling, and cannibalism. There was a scene, she said, where “I’m playing dead and I have contacts, so … I’ve never lost a staring contest, ever, but it was 11 minutes or something, and my eyes were open the entire time and the lights were so bright — and they melted my contacts all over my eye. They burned into my eye.”

That’s a pretty intense statement. Also, one that would seem to have severe, if not permanent, medical consequences. Let’s look at some research here.

Here’s a take from news organization Essilor. It cites a Facebook rumor from 2013 claiming that a woman wore contacts to a barbeque and “stared at the fire charcoals continuously for 2-3 minutes.” Apparently, the “heat from the charcoal melted her contact lenses” and she would be blind forever. Is this true? No.

Contacts are sterilized using “autoclaving,” or moist heat, in temperatures that reach 250 degrees Fahrenheit. The boiling point of water is 212 degrees Fahrenheit. That means that temperatures upwards of 250 would need to be present to melt a contact. At that temperature, not only would a human eye get cooked — human skin would as well.

If people’s contacts were really melting during BBQs and bonfires, there would be millions of cases, and not just a rumor of some girl at a BBQ. The real danger of wearing contacts comes if you keep them in too long. People can develop conjunctivitis, Keratitis (conjunctivitis but just for the cornea), and Corneal Neovascularization — a condition where the eye develops new blood vessels from lack of oxygen, which causes vision damage.

Does this mean Fanning is lying? That’s up to the eye of the observer (sorry). She’s an actress and she’s doing an interview for a magazine, so she’s probably just trying to entertain with a fun little anecdote that holds no basis in medical science. Wouldn’t be the first time.