In 1994, Paul was an ordinary-looking guy with fair skin and freckles. If you had seen him on the street, you might not have looked or thought twice about him. Now when he walks down the street, people can't take their eyes off of him…Paul's skin is blue.
"You're about to see something I've never seen before," Oprah says. "This is a first on The Oprah Show. We have never had a blue man in all these years."
Paul's blue skin is no trick of lighting or makeup—it's really blue.
What caused it? Paul says it started when his friend who worked for years in a machine shop was diagnosed with petroleum poisoning. Paul says he saw an ad in a magazine for something called a colloidal silver generator that said colloidal silver was useful for treating conditions including petroleum poisoning. "So I ordered the generator and I'd go see [his friend] every day. We'd each make a glass of colloidal silver and we'd drink it," he says.
Paul says the drinks he and his friend had weren't particularly strong—a 10-ounce glass with no more than 10 parts per million of silver. Still, what made Paul—who didn't have petroleum poisoning—take a drink? "I figured I might as well drink it, too, if it was such wonderful stuff," he says. "I wasn't going to say, 'Here, take this.' I thought the kindest thing to do would be to take it with him just to make him more comfortable with the idea."
After he started his daily silver cocktail with his friend, Paul says his acid reflux disease disappeared. "In less than three days, that was just gone," he says. "I thought, 'That's good.' So I kept taking it."
Paul says that he doesn't believe his daily silver drink is what made him blue. "I didn't turn blue until I started putting it on my face," he says.
While Paul was taking care of his elderly parents and his father was nearing the end of his life, Paul says he was extremely stressed. "I developed the most unbelievable case of dermatitis you've probably ever seen. My skin was peeling off of my face in ribbons. I looked like a mummy coming unwrapped," he says. "And where the skin pieces separated, I was developing fistula—the skin was cracking."
Paul says he'd previously dabbed a little bit of colloidal silver on cat scratches and marveled at the effect. So he started applying silver all over his damaged skin.
From there, Paul says his skin began a gradual change over two to three months from fair white to blue. "It was so gradual, nobody noticed," he says. "It wasn't until a friend came by who hadn't seen me in a while. … He said, 'What have you got on your face?' [I said,] 'I don't have anything on my face.' And he said, 'It looks like you've got camouflage makeup on or something. You better come here.'" Paul stood in front of the mirror with his friend and realized his unbelievable transformation.
Dr. Oz says drinking a silver solution is actually a very old therapy that dates back thousands of years. Though use of silver has largely fallen out of medical use since the introduction of antibiotics, Dr. Oz says silver is still regularly given to newborn babies to make sure they don't develop a disease from their mothers during childbirth and is even used to treat some burns.
"It prevents the bacteria from making energy, but it does the same thing to our cells," he says.
Paul has so much silver in his body that he has a condition called argyria. "You know how you get silver in a photographic plate, when it gets exposed to sun it turns a color? Well the same thing happened to you," Dr. Oz says. "You basically tattooed your entire body with this silver."
"It's going to save me a lot of money at the tattoo parlor," Paul jokes.
Paul met his fiancée, Jackie, after he had already turned blue. Jackie was a friend of Paul's sister, who is an artist. One day while Paul's sister was painting a portrait of her, Jackie picked up the phone. Paul was on the other end.
Jackie says the two of them talked on the phone for three or four hours a night for the next six months. Though Paul's sister had explained that her brother's skin was blue, Jackie had still not seen Paul in a photo or in person. "We talked on the phone for several months, so I knew the man," she says.
Weeks before their first in-person meeting, Paul's cousin sent Jackie a photo. "She called me and said, 'Please know he is a wonderful man. He's a good man. Please don't let the color scare you,'" Jackie says. "I printed it, and I pulled it out. I'm looking, and I'm going, 'Oh, wow! Oh, wow!" But I had to go back to the man I had fallen in love with."
"I'm all for looking beyond color," Oprah says.
Paul says that the most difficult part of having blue skin is the intense,
quizzical stares he gets when he is out in public—but he says he understands why
they stare. "When you see something that's so unusual, something that you've
probably never seen before, it's just natural for people to be curious," he
says.
Dr. Oz says Paul may need to get used to those stares—for the rest of his life. His skin will never return to its natural color. "You've been drinking it long and you've been putting it on your skin," he says. "So it's in your liver and your brain, which is why sometimes it can cause seizures if it gets to high enough amounts."
Dr. Oz offers to draw some of Paul's blood to make sure his changes are only skin deep…and not dangerous to his health.
"Be my guest," Paul says. "It's a deal."
