Ordering Custom Eyes from CandyKittensEmporium

I'm still working away on Paradigm, and one of the things I found a little frustrating is the mismatch between his eyes.  As I mentioned before, his purple eye is a Safrindoll one, a 14mm low-dome small iris, and his grey one is an Alice's Collections eye in 14mm high-dome normal iris.  I know his grey eye is supposed to be artificial, but the difference between them was jarring even before the major gapping caused by the high dome.

The problem is, it's actually really hard to find nice purple eyes, and just as hard to find nice grey ones — and to make things worse, although Paradigm's supposed to take 14mm eyes, the gapping at the sides was really bad.  So what do you do when you need eyes?  You hit up the usual haunts!  Only... while Mako eyes have a nice grey, they didn't have a purple I liked.  Cast In Glass's site layout always confuses me slightly and I forget where I've found things, and having to email the order kind of put me off too.  (For some reason I thought it was them who only had open order periods now and again, but I can't remember... so that put me off a little too, I didn't want to go bothering someone who wasn't expecting to receive orders.)  And so many other places only have high dome eyes, which really weren't suitable...

So with no real hope of success I turned to Etsy... and on Linny S. Shephard's 'CandyKittensEmporium' promptly found some purple eyes in the absolute perfect shade for him.  So at the ever-sensible time of ~10:30pm on the 2nd August I asked whether it was possible to have eyes in purple and eyes a little like another kind available with small irises ... and fully expected to hear back the next day (if at all — I have variable luck contacting people about things they're selling, it's pretty much 50/50 on whether they actually want to deal with me so for the most part I've stopped bothering).

I wasn't expecting to get an almost immediate reply from Linny with more information and a couple of questions.  We chatted back and forth about Paradigm's peculiar eye needs until Linny had all the information required and on the 5th August I paid.

Ten days later they've just come through the post — much faster than I anticipated — and they're perfect.  They're exactly the shade I wanted and they both fit perfectly and look incredible in him.  I'll definitely be ordering again: Linny also does cat-eyes and I have a little Doll Family-A MiaoMiao who shipped with some worryingly human ones, so once he's painted he'll be in need of something a little more feline.

I probably shouldn't be looking around to see who else could use some new eyes...

(Photos will be inbound when 1) I fetch my camera back downstairs and 2) Paradigm has hair.  I should probably have taken a picture of them on the card they arrived with, but honestly?  Too excited to see how they looked in him.  And really a cellphone picture wouldn't do them justice.)

Paradigm with his older, mismatched eyes. Grey one: Alice's Collections; purple one: Safrindoll.

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Paradigm's new eyes, and another terrible cellphone photo. One day I'll learn to use this thing.