Tears aren’t just salty water we wipe away. From sadness to joy, or even chopping onions, many things make us cry. But some people actually collect tears! Scientists, artists, and creators see tears differently. They look for special uses in things others ignore, even bodily fluids.
These folks are giving a whole new meaning to crying. Thanks to them, tears might soon help save lives, power new gadgets, or make foods and drinks extra special. Here are ten amazing, odd, and fascinating stories about why people collect tears.
10. Tears: A Window to Your Health
Did you know tears are like filtered blood? It sounds strange, but it’s true! They have tiny bits of sugar and other things found in blood. This made scientists wonder if tears could show signs of sickness. And it seems they can! We literally leak information.
Tears can show signs for serious diseases like cancer and Parkinson’s. There’s even a way to use tears instead of a mammogram to check for breast cancer. Tears from mice have also shown signs of pollution and drug use.
This is a big deal because getting tears is easy and doesn’t hurt, unlike blood tests. We always have a little bit of wetness in our eyes. This means tears could be used to check our health all the time. Even NASA thought about using astronauts’ tears in 2018. They wanted to learn how long space trips affect human health.
9. Ancient Tear Catchers: Myth or Reality?
You might have heard stories about people in the past collecting tears in special bottles. These narrow, often pretty, glass bottles are called “lachrymatories” or “tear catchers.”
Finding these bottles in old Greek and Roman tombs made people think they were for mourning. A story grew that mourners cried into these bottles and buried them with the dead. It was said that many tears meant the person was very loved and respected.
People in the Victorian era were also said to use these bottles. They’d fill them with tears, and when the tears dried up, their mourning time ended. However, experts now have a simpler idea: they were just perfume bottles.
The tear-catching stories were probably made up by clever sellers. But it worked! Many people still buy these bottles today, thinking they are tear catchers, and yes, some probably use them to catch tears.
8. Brewing Bitters with a Dash of Tears
One of the strangest uses for tears is making bitters for drinks. The food art company Bompas & Parr had this idea in 2015. They held a workshop to teach people how to make bitters using their own tears. They promised the tears wouldn’t change the taste much.
They called this unusual ingredient an “emotional infusion.” The alcohol and other herbs would mostly hide the tear flavor. So, drinkers wouldn’t feel like they were sipping saltwater. To help people cry at the workshop, there was a quiet “corner of repose.” They also had menthol sticks, like actors use to cry on cue.
Interestingly, this project was partly inspired by the old myth of tear-catching bottles. But these tear-bitters weren’t for sadness. Instead, the idea was to give them as unique Christmas gifts.
7. Bottled Tears for Mental Health Awareness
Fame from reality TV doesn’t always last long. Contestants usually have a short time to make a mark before people forget them. In 2017, Chris Hughes, a British farmer famous from the show Love Island, did something unique.
He launched a special mineral water called “L’Eau de Chris.” The label said it was “mineral water infused with a Chris Hughes tear.” He showed it off in a dramatic black and white video. In it, a tear rolled down his cheek and into the bottle.
Some people thought it was gross and unhygienic. But they had nothing to worry about. The tear water was actually a stunt for World Mental Health Day. In another video, Hughes explained it was silly how “men bottle up their emotions every single day.”
6. The Noah Cyrus $12,000 Tears Hoax
Chris Hughes wasn’t the only celebrity joking about selling bottled tears. In 2018, singer Noah Cyrus used her breakup with rapper Lil Xan for marketing. She released merchandise about her sadness, including a T-shirt with her dad Billy Ray’s face saying “achy, breaky.”
The item that got the most attention was a bottle of her tears, priced at a shocking $12,000. While some celebrities sell strange things (like used tissues or kidney stones), this was just a stunt. Noah probably didn’t think anyone would try to buy them.
But she underestimated her fans. One fan started a GoFundMe to buy the bottle and raised over $1,000! Cyrus had to step in. She offered to pay back the donors and give them backstage passes to her show.
5. Crafting Cheese with Human Tears
Synthetic biology is a science that changes living things to give them new abilities. This could be animals, tiny bacteria, or viruses. It can help industries like medicine, farming, and even cheesemaking.
In 2013, scientist Christina Agapakis and scent expert Sissel Tolaas worked together. They took bacteria from human bodies and grew them in milk to make cheese. Some bacteria came from the tears of artist Olafur Eliasson. Writer Michael Pollan gave bacteria from his belly button!
The cheeses supposedly smelled like the body odor of the people who gave the bacteria. They would have tasted like them too, but they weren’t for eating. They were part of an art display in Dublin. The goal was to help people get over fears of tiny organisms and show the power of bacteria.
4. Tears as a New Kind of Pepper Spray?
Okay, nobody is actually saying you can squirt tears to defend yourself. But research from 2023 found something interesting about women’s tears. Smelling women’s tears can reduce male aggression by nearly 44%. This happens because tears change men’s brain activity.
For the study, tears were collected from women who could cry easily. They needed emotional tears, so the women watched sad movies. They collected their tears in a small tube once a day for up to 25 days. That sounds like a lot, but people don’t produce many tears when they cry. Each donation was only about 1.6 ml.
This might be why most research on human chemical signals focuses on sweat, which is easier to collect. The study’s findings matched what scientists already knew about rats. This suggests that tears in all mammals might help reduce aggression.
3. Painting with Tears: An Artist’s Unique Method
It took six women to collect enough tears for the aggression study. But Argentinian artist Leandro Granato cried out an amazing 800 ml of tears for just one painting! He doesn’t need deep sadness or tragedy to cry. His tears just need to contain paint.
How does he do it? He snorts paint colors up his nose! As a child, he found that liquids put in his nose could come out of his eye. So, instead of just crying, he can actually squirt paint from his eye. This is how he creates his abstract splatter paintings. Even his family thought he was crazy when he decided to make a living this way. He calls his technique “eye-painting.” His paintings have sold for over $1,000.
2. The Topography of Tears: Emotions Under a Microscope
Another artist who collected her tears for years is photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher. After losing a friend she had recently reconnected with, Fisher felt both sad and thankful. She cried a lot. One day, she became curious about what her tears looked like up close.
She put a tear on a glass slide and looked at it under a special camera, magnified 100 times. The image looked like a strange landscape seen from above. For the next ten years, she carried slides with her. She collected tear samples whenever she cried – from sadness, happiness, or even cutting onions.
Not every tear made it into her project. Fisher used her artistic judgment. She only published a tear picture if she thought it was meaningful and looked interesting. Her project, “The Topography of Tears,” captured what she called her “emotional terrain.”
1. Smart Contact Lenses Powered by Tears
Augmented reality with headsets and phones seems new, but technology is moving fast. Researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore created a tiny battery. It’s perfect for smart contact lenses. Why? Because it can be charged by tears! This means it could charge itself while you wear it.
The battery is super thin, less than a millimeter. But it can power a device for a whole day. We’ve known for a while that a protein in tears called lysozyme can make electricity under pressure. But this new battery doesn’t use that.
Instead, it uses the sodium and chloride ions also found in tears. Another cool thing is that these batteries are safe for the human eye. They don’t even need metal wires, even though they create electricity.
So, the next time you shed a tear, remember it’s more than just water. It’s a complex fluid that’s inspiring scientists, artists, and innovators in so many surprising ways. From health diagnostics to emotional art and even futuristic tech, tears hold a lot of potential. Who knew crying could be so fascinating?
What’s the most surprising fact about collecting tears you learned today? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
