VIDEO: Albino Twins Are Taking the Fashion Industry by Storm

Lara and Mara Bawar are not your average supermodels, but their striking appearance is sending shock waves through the fashion industry.

The two 11 year old twins from Brazil suffer from a condition that causes a lack of skin and hair pigment – albinism.

The girls decided to embrace it to the fullest and make the best of it!

According to Wikipedia, albinism in humans is a congenital disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes. Albinism is associated with a number of vision defects, such as photophobia, nystagmus, and amblyopia. Lack of skin pigmentation makes for more susceptibility to sunburn and skin cancers.

In rare cases such as Chédiak–Higashi syndrome, albinism may be associated with deficiencies in the transportation of melanin granules. This also affects essential granules present in immune cells leading to increased susceptibility to infection.

Albinism results from inheritance of recessive gene alleles and is known to affect all vertebrates, including humans. It is due to absence or defect of tyrosinase, a copper-containing enzyme involved in the production of melanin. It is the opposite of melanism.

Unlike humans, other animals have multiple pigments and for these, albinism is considered to be a hereditary condition characterised by the absence of melanin in particular, in the eyes, skin, hair, scales, feathers or cuticle.

While an organism with complete absence of melanin is called an albino an organism with only a diminished amount of melanin is described as leucistic or albinoid. The term is from the Latin albus, “white”.

Genetic testing can confirm albinism and what variety it is, but offers no medical benefits except in the cases of non-OCA disorders that cause albinism along with other medical problems which may be treatable. There is no ‘cure’ for Albinism. The symptoms of albinism can be assisted by various methods.

As there is no cure for albinism, it is managed through lifestyle adjustments. People with albinism need to take care not to sunburn and should have regular healthy skin checks by a dermatologist.

For the most part, treatment of the eye conditions consists of visual rehabilitation. Surgery is possible on the extra-ocular muscles to decrease strabismus. Nystagmus-damping surgery can also be performed, to reduce the “shaking” of the eyes back and forth. The effectiveness of all these procedures varies greatly and depends on individual circumstances.

Glasses and other vision aids, large-print materials as well as bright but angled reading lights, can help individuals with albinism, even though their vision cannot be corrected completely. Some people with albinism do well using bifocals (with a strong reading lens), prescription reading glasses, and/or hand-held devices such as magnifiers or monoculars.

Albinism is often associated with the absence of an iris in the eye. Contact lenses may be colored to block light transmission through the aniridic eye. Some use bioptics, glasses which have small telescopes mounted on, in, or behind their regular lenses, so that they can look through either the regular lens or the telescope.

Newer designs of bioptics use smaller light-weight lenses. Some US states allow the use of bioptic telescopes for driving motor vehicles.