While photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher was going through an overwhelming period of grief and sorrow she wondered if her tears would look any different than tears of joy when viewed through a microscope.
Determined to find out the answer, her curiosity led her to study and photograph around a hundred tears produced under different circumstances. What she discovered was nothing less than amazing:
She discovered that our tears of sorrow don’t even resemble the ones that leak out when we laugh until we cry. And, basal tears (the ones our body produces to lubricate our eyes) are drastically different from the tears that flow when we are cutting onions.
“Tears of Laughing ‘Til I’m Crying”
“Tears of Grief”
“Basal Tears”
“Onion Tears”
When I looked at the pictures and the differences i immediately remembered Dr. Masaru Emoto’s study of water where he captured water’s ‘expressions.
According to Joseph Stromberg from the Smithsonian’s Collage of Arts and Sciences, there are three major categories of tears: basal, reflex (produced when something irritates the eye), and psychic (or emotional). While all types of tears have a base of water and salt, they are also comprised of a variety of proteins. These proteins, combined with the varying crystallization patterns of the salt, are what cause the variety in Rose-Lynn’s pictures:
“Tears of Remembrance”
“Tears of Elation at a Liminal Moment”
“Tears of Possibility and Hope”
“Tears of Release”
