We must be running out of places to adorn our bodies with jewelry. I say this in light of some information I have come across recently.

While thumbing through last week’s edition of the Seattle Weekly, I spotted an advertisement for a dental service that will affix a tiny precious jewel – pure gold and/or a real diamond – to your tooth. The ad promises to bond the item to your tooth just like an orthodontic bracket, and features a photograph of an attractive woman smiling so you can see the sparkling diamond she has glued to one of her pearly whites.

I don’t know if this will catch on with the general public, because to me it looks like the woman has a glistening piece of food caught in her teeth.

Far more weird, however, is an Internet story I stumbled upon that details how Dutch eye surgeons have implanted tiny pieces of jewelry in the mucous membrane of the eyes of six women and one man at the aptly named Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery.

The institute also engages in non-jewelry-related work such as developing new ocular surgical techniques in corneal, cataract and retinal surgery.

Anyway, the procedure involves inserting a .13 inch (3.5 mm for our metric-loving European friends) wide piece of specially developed jewelry – the range includes a glittering half-moon or heart – INTO the eye’s mucous membrane under local anesthetic! The piece of jewelry is inserted in the conjunctiva – the mucous membrane lining the inner surface of the eyelids and front of the eyeball – in sterile conditions using an operating microscope in a procedure taking about 15 minutes.

This cosmetic surgery raises several important questions: 1) How gross is this? 2) What kind of man would want a half-moon or heart stuck to his eyeball, as opposed to something more macho like a skull or dagger? 3) Is this procedure safe?

The answers are: 1) very 2) a European man and 3) maybe. “So far we have not seen any side effects or complications and we don’t expect any in the future,” said Gerrit Melles, institute director.

So, while you might go blind, at least your eyes will look good.

Remember the good ol’ days, when body piercings and tattoos were considered extreme?

“My Two Cents” is a weekly column where the author – whose only form of jewelry worn is a watch – gets in his two cents worth, in spite of the old saying that states you only get a penny for your thoughts.