Typically, when someone goes blue, it’s because they’re suffocating and about to die. But, one US man managed to turn himself permanently blue, earning himself the name ‘Papa Smurf.’
Initially, Paul Karason was a regular, white skinned Oregon man. But, dealing with a little dermatitis, he started looking around for a cure. He started mixing his own concoction of colloidal silver, which he drank daily. For around a decade, he ingested around 10 ounces a day.
It worked for the blue man, too, and he claimed that it solved stomach issues, as well as arthritic ones. But what he didn’t realise is that it was also changing the color of his skin. Ingestion of silver this way will often turn the skin, eyes, nails, and gums blue. It can even affect internal organs.
So, although his repeated silver self-medication was helping his body, it was also turning him into a blue man via the side effects. According to an interview with ABC, he didn’t even realise until a friend pointed it out.
Feeling Blue
Paul was too wrapped up in the positives of his silver discovery to notice the negative side effects. But when his friend came over, he was quickly made aware that his coloration was off. “And he looks at me and he says, ‘What have you got on your face?’ ‘I don’t have anything on my face!'” Karason told ABC. “He says, ‘Well, it looks like you’ve got camouflage makeup on or something.’ And by golly, he came in and he was very fair-skinned, as I used to be. And that’s when it hit me.”
Now, he was permanently blue, and noticeably so. The man was the kind of blue that Violet turns in Willy Wonka. But he came to terms with it. In fact, he still took his silver medicine up until his death in 2013. “I mean, once you turn blue, you sort of resign yourself to being different,” he told ABC.
He earned himself the name Papa Smurf, with his white hair and blue skin. He said, depending on who called him the nickname, he didn’t mind. According to his wife, he was quite a homebody anyway.