Eyes Fixing high-dome eyes for hard-to-fit sculpts

Older SD size dolls take bigger eyes, often 18 or 20mm, but often it's hard to get the eye seated correctly. If it sits too far back in the socket, even just by a couple of mm, the iris is in shadow and doesn't photograph well.
You can improve the fit and reduce the pupil size of highly-domed eyes by reducing the height of the curve with abrasives. I've done this on acrylic and resin eyes, and based on the success I've had sanding the stems off glass eyes, I bet you could do it with glass if you had the right polishing compound.

If you have a pair of eyes in the perfect style and overall diameter that just won't go in right, give it a try :>

Round 1, Acrylic: I Didn't Take Enough Photos Of This Project
Last year, I gave my sister's Sleeping Soony mod a revamp, which included a new pair of eyes to work with her dreamy facial expression.
I picked Glastics acrylics to try this out on for budget reasons. They're widely available in the US and they come in an array of realistic colors at a price point suitable for experimentation. Original cheap circa-2005 acrylic eye on the right for comparison.

I wet-sanded the surface of the eyes with fine sandpaper and then used Novus polishes #1, #2, and #3 to polish them back to transparency.

Pretty good! Her eyes used to just photograph black.

Round 2, Resin: Wasn't Sure If It Was Going To Be Too Soft To Polish But It Worked Out Fine
Another old Cerberus Project head, another hassle to get the dang eyes to fit. This is Juri '06. The eyewells are 20mm but the eye opening is narrow top to bottom. I loved this pair of IntoX resin eyes but the fit wasn't perfect.

See the gap? It would look fine with white eye putty, but having the eye set back further into the socket makes it harder to see the color of the iris.


I started by sanding for fit with 600 grit sandpaper. This was enough height reduction to fit without a gap.


Once you start the surface turns white and it's hard to see what you're doing. You can check your work by wetting the eye. See how the pupil is smaller without the extra magnification?


I continued wet-sanding through 1000, 1500, 2000, 4000, 8000, and 10000 grit sandpaper. The higher grits can be hard to find at regular hardware stores: if there's no store near you that caters to modelling hobbyists, you can check automotive supply stores.

The eye on the left side of the photo has been modified, the eye on the right is unmodified. They still have some "follow me" effect but not so much that the pupil doesn't appear centered in the iris when viewed from the front.


High-dome eyes do this thing where when viewed from the side you tend to see the image captured in the lens rather than the iris color.


You can see the iris color this way.


Hope this helps somebody find a happy medium between "order tons of eyes, nothing fits right" and "give up, learn to make eyes from scratch"~

 

There is an amateur hobby with the technical information you seek! Do a search about DIY telescope lens grinding :> A lot of it will be technical information about getting the curvature/pitch right but they're the glass-sanding experts.