Uruguay man’s eye-popping trick earns him a world record
Written by Angie Sharma on May 1, 2025
A Uruguay man living in Italy found himself with a Guinness World Records title thanks to an unusual party trick: popping his eyes out of their sockets.
Williams Martin Sanchez Lopez, who is from Montevideo, Uruguay, and currently lives in Milan, Italy, said he learned when he was about 8 or 9 years old that he was able to relax the muscles around his eyes and cause his eyeballs to pop out like a cartoon character.
It started when I was a kid,” he told Guinness World Records. “I could basically move the upper and lower part of the muscles around my eyes, [and] over time I perfected my skill until at last I was able to move the eye completely out of its socket.”
Lopez’s doctor performed official measurements and found his eyes could pop .74 inches out of their sockets, enough to earn him the title for the farthest eyeball pop (male).
“The funniest thing is when maybe a person doesn’t realize what they’re about to see, when I come close to them and pop out my entire eyeball in this way, people definitely don’t just sit there and watch, but they basically jump two meters high,” Williams said.
