Woman Gets 'Golden Eye' After Cruel Comments About Missing Eye While Working As Barmaid
A former barmaid who got fed up of comments about her missing eye by punters is now a real 'Goldeneye' - thanks to a gold prosthetic she proudly wears.
25-year-old Danni Winrow from Liverpool, Merseyside, was diagnosed with retinoblastoma - a rare type of eye cancer that usually affects young children - when she was just six months old and subsequently had her right eye removed.
She's worn a prosthetic eye ever since, but was sadly bullied at school for her 'boy eye'.
But the worse was sadly to come when she started working as a barmaid, with the most cutting comments coming from grown men. One punter even gave her a £20 tip to 'go and fix' her 'dead eye'.
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However, her life changed for the better last year when she met other eye cancer survivors that realised that she 'wasn't alone'.
Inspired, she removed her prosthetic eye for the first time in public, finding it 'liberating' and 'transformative'.
Now, she embraces her uniqueness by wearing a custom-made bright gold sparkly eye which cost £162.
Danni said: "Now I take it [the prosthetic eye] out all the time and wear the gold one constantly because I don't care what people think.
"I just embrace my eye. I love wearing my different eye and I go without it. When I look in the mirror now I feel a lot better, more comfortable and settled.
She chose to have a gold eye made because she wears a lot of gold make-up and the colour tends to bring out the green in her other eye.
She said: "I want to raise awareness. I'd tell others to just embrace it, you can't change it, you can't go back.
"Obviously if I didn't have my eye removed I wouldn't be here now, I can't hate it. I'm here and living my best life."
Now working as a civil servant, Danni said she felt different growing up and was constantly picked on after her eye moved at a young age.
Danni said: "I've never really had much self confidence because I was bullied a lot for growing up for looking different, so that's obviously not helped.
"I've been bullied over my eye for my whole life, I don't really know any different.
"There'd be times where I'd rub my prosthetic eye when I was little in school and it would fall out and that was horrendous.
"Because I couldn't put it back in myself I'd have to sit there and wait for my mum or nan to come and pick me up and put it back in for me because obviously the teachers couldn't do it so I'd have to get an eye patch and sit there with an eye patch on instead."
Danni would then wear her hair over face and continued to receive comments into adulthood and in the end wouldn't even look in the mirror without her prosthetic in.
"I feel like bullying was why I didn't like myself with my eye in and obviously if I had comments with it in, I thought 'what are they going to say without it in?'" she said.
Simon Catling