Sarah McDaniel was 20 years old when half the internet found itself staring into her eyes.
She was born in Roseville, California, with heterochromia: each iris a different color. According to media outlets that covered her case, the condition affects about six in every thousand people. Her photos on Facebook and Instagram multiplied, and so did the questions: contact lenses? Photoshop? She responded bluntly that her eyes were 100% natural.
Far from hiding her feature, she called it a “beautiful imperfection” and adopted a phrase as her motto: “I’m not perfect, I’m real”. Photographer Gregorio Campos, who photographed her for Arsenic magazine, summed it up this way: “I believe in beautiful imperfections”. The agency LA Models offered her a contract, and Sarah, known on Instagram as “Krotchy”, stopped being a passing phenomenon and became a model and actress.
What many would have tried to conceal ended up being exactly what no one could stop looking at.