Chiikawa contacts are a cute way to add some subtle anime flair to your look.

In Japanese, there’s a phrase, “Me ni irete mo itakunai,” which translates literally to “It won’t hurt even if you put it into your eye.” What could be so wonderous that you wouldn’t mind doing something ordinarily so painful? Why, something very, very cute, of course!

Me in irete mo itakunai is most commonly used by people to describe their children, grandchildren, or pets, but if we’re talking about cute things, we can’t forget about the anime/manga character Chiikawa, whose very name is a contraction of the words chiisai (“small”) and kawaii (“cute”). So today we’re going to be putting the compactly adorable Chiikawa into our eye…or at least onto it.

Allowing us to do this is En Giorno, a brand of contact lenses from Japanese cosmetics and merchandising company Shobido. En Giorno’s Chiikawa collaboration lineup consists of four models, Chiikawa Pink, Hachiware Greige, Usagi Brown, and Momonga Gray.

We opted to try out the Chiikawa Pink version, and naturally the character is featured on the packaging. There’s more to this crossover than that though, because Chiikawa is also on the contact lenses themselves!

Wasting no time, our Japanese-language reporter Natsuki Gojo promptly put Chiikawa onto her eye, and just like the saying had assured us, it didn’t hurt at all, though that probably has more to do with En Giorno’s precision manufacturing methods than the character’s cuteness.

Still, these lenses are indeed cute, and even more so than Natsuki had at first expected. It wasn’t until she had them in that she noticed that Chiikawa is surrounded by some illustrated sparkles, adding yet another dose of manga-aesthetic style to your eyes.

With the Chiikawa contacts in, Natsuki was looking forward to the excited reactions of friends and family throughout the day. Things didn’t unfold exactly as she’d expected them to, though, since no one, on their own, noticed her new ocular occupant.

This is, perhaps, something we should have seen coming. The En Giorno Chiikawa illustration really does follow the directives of both parts of the character’s name, as it’s very cute, but also very small.

▼ The Chiikawa contact lenses next to a Sylvanian Families baby plushie, the international scientific community’s widely accepted standard for scale comparisons.

On the other hand, every single person who Natsuki pointed out the Chiikawa illustrations instantly got a burst of giddy excitement from the revelation, and actually, the subtle size is probably a plus. For one thing, the illustration is compact enough that it doesn’t affect the wearer’s field of vision, and since it doesn’t immediately stand out, these lenses are pieces of Chiikawa flair that you can wear without disrupting your overall look.

▼ The En Giorno Chiikawa contact lenses come in both prescription and non-prescription versions, and are priced at 2,200 yen (US$14) a pair on the Shobido online store, Amazon, and Rakuten.

So while they’d be an apt choice for a meetup with fellow fans or when heading out to a Chiikawa event or anime screening, they’re also something you can use when just going about your daily life, so that if and when you do run into something unpleasant during the day, you can tell yourself “It’s OK, I’ve got Chiikawa with me.”

Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]