KOTA KINABALU: While some may consider having blue eyes as attractive, for local boy Rusyduddin Roslee Abdullah, being born and living with such condition has not been easy.
Since small, the 18-year-old boy said he often face discrimination from friends, teachers and even potential employers for being mistaken of wearing coloured contact lenses.
"My schoolmates in primary schools used to mock me, saying that I looked like a ghost because of the colour of his eyes.
"My mother told me that some pupils ran out from the toilet whenever I used the washroom.
“When I was eight, she said I once hid under the table of the classroom so others don't look at my eyes,” said the second of six siblings from Putatan.
Fed up, Rusyduddin said he once asked his parents to buy him brown coloured contacts just to look "normal".
He claimed one of the schools he attended even punished him for it and his father Roslee Abdullah, 63, had to be called up to explain his condition.
Recently, when he was applying for a one-month part-time job at a hotel, the manager had asked him to “remove his contact lenses’ if he wanted to work there.
However, Rusyduddin said his two other siblings Refnaldi Ronaldio, 16 and Syahirah Batrisya, three, were luckier despite being born with a blue eye and a brownish eye.
He said Refnaldi had a normal school life as he went to the same primary and secondary school as his elder brother.
Rusyduddin, who is planning to apply for a culinary course at a private college here, said he hopes to start a food business with Refnaldi in the near future.
He believed the three of them had inherited the blue eyes from the maternal side as their grandmother and aunts who had the same trait.
Last week, two siblings with blue eyes from Beaufort caught the attention of the media covering the visit of Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.
Netizens claimed they might have the Waanderburg’s syndrome, a genetic conditions where people may have blue eyes or different coloured eyes, such as one blue eye and one brown eye.