A new collection at the Dunedin Museum of Natural Mystery allows you to do just that.
Last month, museum curator Bruce Mahalski received 560 artificial eyes to put on display from a collection of more than 2000 from the estate of a prosthetic eye-maker in Te Puke.
"I just emailed ... and said ‘Oh, hey, I've got this little museum down in Dunedin ... and we'd be very interested’.
"No money, he didn't charge anyone any money for any of this ... so it was a remarkably generous thing to do."
At the moment, one tray out of eight was on display, but the rest would be going up soon, Mr Mahalski said.
The eyes were hand-painted by James Brown, who travelled the North Island offering his services to anyone who needed an eye fitted.
He was a dental technician at the Burnham Military Camp during World War 2 and, afterwards, went to work at Burwood Hospital in Christchurch.
It was there Mr Brown learnt the art of making artificial eyes from an Englishman who had been making them for wounded soldiers during the war.
The eyes are made from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), also known as acrylic glass or Plexiglas.
Before that, artificial eyes were made from glass, which was much more fragile.
"A lot of work went into both the sizing and the artwork," Mr Mahalski said.
Each eye had to be fitted for the individual’s face, and each iris was hand-painted using — in most cases — the remaining eye as a model.
"Most people, obviously, have lost one eye rather than two ... but, you know, some people do lose two, but he would model it on their eye."
Mr Brown would painstakingly hand-paint an exact replica of the iris — then he would do it all over again.
"He would always make two ... if a person wanted to take two, he would give them two ... but he would keep one aside in case anyone ever needed a replacement."
This was presumably how the collection became so large.
The eyes were the latest in a series of medical history artefacts Mr Mahalski had sourced.
"We've got quite a collection in this museum of medical stuff.
"A lot of it is because we had this medical school here, and a lot of the people who were at the medical school went to Edinburgh.
"The association between Dunedin and Edinburgh may have paved the way for some cutting-edge medicine."
