A New Mexico woman is blaming an internet-famous contact lens start-up for the “total loss” of her right eye, accusing the company—which has faced an avalanche of consumer complaints—of delivering a subpar, ill-fitting product that left her half-blind after less than 10 wears.
Stephanie Guarisco, 56, “underwent a complete removal of her right eye,” and “now has a permanent prosthetic placed in her right eye socket,” due to the lenses she purchased from Hubble Contacts, according to a 31-page lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court.
Further, as Guarisco adjusts to life with one eye, she “continues to receive treatment for issues with her left eye to date,” the suit states.
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“She has undergone immense pain throughout the entirety of the process,” Josh Harris, one of the attorneys representing Guarisco, told The Daily Beast, adding that his client is “doing the best she can, given the circumstances.”
“She’s hopeful this lawsuit will try to make her whole to the extent possible,” he added. “She’ll never have her vision back, but hopefully this will help set her up for the remainder of her life.”
Federal and state authorities have recently lambasted Hubble for misleading customers by quietly substituting its own house brand of lenses, allegedly made with outdated materials, for those actually prescribed by the patient’s doctor. When anyone complained, Hubble “wrongly blamed the prescribers,” then-Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said last year.
Hubble’s splashy ads on social media promise buyers low prices and door-to-door delivery, and the startup has been the subject of Harvard Business School case studies. It quickly raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital after its founding in 2016, and successfully positioned itself as a convenient, low-cost subscription service much the same as those selling razors and skincare creams. However, Hubble also earned a “D” rating from the Better Business Bureau and 1.7 out of five stars from European users of Danish review site TrustPilot, as well as complaints from users of redness, irritation, and corneal ulcers. (Hubble gets 3.1 stars from Americans on TrustPilot.)
Guarisco’s lawsuit is the first known case in which a Hubble customer claims to have lost an eye from using its lenses.
“Hubble’s business model boosted its bottom line but created needless risk for its customers’ eye health,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said last year while announcing millions in fines against the company.
Guarisco first ordered lenses through Hubble in January 2020, according to her suit. She wore them seven to eight times over the next few months but on Aug. 17, 2020, her left eye began hurting so badly, she went to the emergency room, the lawsuit says. There, Guarisco was diagnosed with a corneal ulcer, “which was noted as being associated with a contact lens,” according to the suit.
Two days later, things had not improved, according to Guarisco. She says she visited an urgent care eye specialist who diagnosed her with two more conditions in her left eye: corneal neovascularization and iridocyclitis. She returned again another two days later “for continued red, itchy, painful eyes with constant tearing and swelling,” the lawsuit states. The following month, an eye exam deemed the ulcer a “perforated multiorganism infection with near total melt and extrusion of lens,” according to the suit.
From there, things only got worse, Guarisco claims.
As 2021 rolled around, Guarisco says she returned to the ER with alarming issues now in her other eye, including pain, discharge, redness, itching, and “visual disturbances.” She was subsequently diagnosed with a corneal ulcer and scleritis in the right eye, and received a corneal transplant in Feb. 2021 to try and restore her declining vision, according to the lawsuit.
But, the transplant was rejected and in March 2021 Guarisco went under the knife again for a second corneal transplant in her right eye, the lawsuit states. In April 2021, she underwent yet another surgery to the same eye in an attempt to fix her sight, it goes on. However, Guarisco’s condition only worsened and on Sept. 17, 2021, doctors were forced to enucleate her right eye and replace it with a prosthesis. (It is unclear from Guarisco’s lawsuit if she was wearing lenses, glasses, or a combination of both, during this period.)
“During [Guarisco’s] use of Defendant’s contact lenses, she did not know the use of the lenses was hazardous to her health and eyesight,” the lawsuit says, noting that Guarisco continues to suffer problems with her left eye.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Hubble said, “The health and safety of our customers is our number one priority. We take the allegations in the complaint seriously, as we do with all customer complaints. We were saddened to hear about this occurrence and were unaware of the customer’s claims until we received the lawsuit. We began our investigation immediately following. Given the early stages of the case, we are unable to further comment on the specifics of the allegations or the results of our internal investigation.”
Guarisco’s suit claims Hubble lenses were “unsafe, defective, and inherently dangerous,” alleging the company “did not verify prescriptions,” and rather than sending out the lenses as ordered, it instead shipped its own “one size fits all” lenses to customers. When Hubble did contact a patient’s doctor, it “knowingly and intentionally sent flawed robotic and incomprehensible verification messages to prescribers, which would not allow for replay of the message,” according to the suit.
“If after eight business hours they received no response, [Hubble] treated the order as verified and sent consumers Hubble contact lenses,” the suit continues.
Passive verification, whereby a script can be filled if a doctor doesn’t respond within eight hours, is legal under the FTC’s so-called Contact Lens Rule but Hubble purposely made its verification queries almost impossible to understand, either by garbling voicemails or structuring the wording of its messages to intentionally create misunderstandings, the agency said in a civil complaint last year. The messages “sometimes commenced while the live agent was talking, making them even harder to understand, and sometimes the messages were played, in their entirety, over hold music, even though it was evident that no one from the prescriber’s office was listening,” the complaint said.
“In some instances, Hubble’s agents left verification messages at phone numbers that are clearly not eye care practitioners, or even doctor’s offices,” the complaint went on.
Guarisco will require further surgeries to alleviate her suffering and restore the sight in her left eye, the suit states.
Unlike Hubble, other contact lens providers such as 1-800-CONTACTS vet prescriptions with each patient’s doctor, filling orders with name-brand products rather than their own make, according to a 2019 article in The New York Times, in which eyecare professionals criticized Hubble’s overall model. One doctor said she refused to have anything to do with Hubble after one of its co-founders described its plan to “move consumers from their prescribed brands and into a private label brand through passive verification,” according to the article.
“I told them I did not want to be involved with such a company and described in great detail why contact lenses are not generic items like socks or razors, how even small micron level changes in something such as the edge design can completely alter the fit and safety profile of a contact lens,” Dr. Sally Dillehay told the outlet.
According to Guarisco’s lawsuit, a not insignificant portion of Hubble’s customers also appear to be distancing themselves from the company. Citing a Hubble “retention analysis” from Feb. 2018, the suit claims that roughly 40 percent to 50 percent of customers canceled their subscriptions by the end of the third month. About 22 percent of customers said their Hubble lenses were uncomfortable, 13 percent said they couldn’t see with their Hubble lenses, and 18 percent said their healthcare providers “would not let them wear Hubble lenses,” it states.
On top of it all, Guarisco’s suit says Hubble execs tried to burnish the company’s flagging reputation by having employees leave positive reviews on the Better Business Bureau website, and offering customers a month of free lenses in exchange for a good review. If that didn’t work, the lawsuit claims Hubble was prepared to go even further. This was revealed last year in the FTC’s civil complaint, which includes details of how the company allegedly went about covertly juicing its image.
In early 2018, Hubble “became concerned about a low BBB rating,” the FTC complaint said. “Hubble asked the BBB about its low rating, and was told that it was due, in part, to the number of customer complaints Hubble had received.”
According to the FTC, Hubble’s CEO inquired internally about paying the BBB to increase its rating, or launching a promotion that would “rustle up” positive reviews.
One review subsequently left on the BBB website read, “I love this company!!! Omg I’m so sick of everyone complaining because they don’t know how to follow instructions. Literally was so simple. … I don’t have to wait long if I have a question too and want to call them up which is surprising. Overall very satisfied customer here!”
What no one ever disclosed, according to the FTC complaint, was that the “very satisfied customer” was in fact Hubble’s director of customer experience.
In January 2022, Vision Path paid $3.5 million to settle the FTC’s allegations that it violated both the FTC Act and the Contact Lens Rule.
Taken together, Hubble’s business practices are nothing short of “extreme and outrageous,” according to Guarisco’s lawsuit. She is now asking for damages of an undetermined amount, alleging, among other things, defective design, failure to warn, breach of warranty, negligence, and violation of consumer fraud laws.
