The Truth About The Last Alaskans Girls' Rare Condition

For reality TV stars, life in the public eye often invites undue judgement. Yet while shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills thrive on drama, the daughters from The Last Alaskans have found themselves the targets of unwarranted hate speech because of their looks.

Upon first glance, it's clear sisters Molly, Emma, and Sarah — children of Ray and Cindy Lewis — look a bit different with regard to their eyes. Per Starcasm, some viewers cruelly speculated that their appearance comes from being inbred, but in reality, the daughters suffer from a rare genetic condition: Blepharophimosis, ptosis, and epicanthus inversus syndrome (BPES).

According to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, BPES presents four distinct facial features at birth — narrow eyes, droopy eyelids, an upward fold of skin of the inner lower eyelids, and widely set eyes — which can cause difficulty when opening the eyes fully and impact an affected individual's quality of vision. NORD adds that, while BPES type I involves premature ovarian insufficiency in females along with the characteristic facial features, BPES type II manifests as these facial features alone.

While Starcasm notes the family doesn't know which BPES type they carry, they know the rare condition came from the recessive gene carried by mother Cindy. However, it's doubly rare that all three daughters acquired this mutation, as the likelihood of passing the altered gene from parent to child reportedly remains low at 50%. Even so, this condition hasn't hindered the sisters one bit.