A Night for Know the Glow: Why We Donated to a Cause About Children’s Eyes

A celebration of generosity, community, and the power of giving back.

Notes from an evening at Jenni Kayne Brentwood, and what we learned about a warning sign most parents have never heard of. On October 13, 2026, we were honored to support Know the Glow at its fundraising event, hosted by Megan Webber at Jenni Kayne Brentwood.

We work in aesthetics. We are not an eye care practice, and we want to be upfront that we came to this cause as supporters rather than experts. But the thing that struck our team about Know the Glow is how little most people know about something that can be spotted in an ordinary flash photograph, and how much difference that knowledge makes when a parent catches it in time.

What “the Glow” actually is

Most parents have seen red eye in photos. Red is normal. It is light bouncing off the healthy retina.

What Know the Glow works to make people aware of is a white or unusual glow in a child’s pupil, known medically as leukocoria. It is not a disease itself. It is a signal, and it can point to more than twenty different conditions that threaten a child’s sight, including congenital cataract, Coats’ disease, retinopathy of prematurity, and retinoblastoma. Many of these are treatable, and several are far more treatable when they are caught early.

Know the Glow is a global nonprofit working to eliminate preventable childhood blindness through exactly this kind of awareness, running campaigns in local languages across dozens of countries and connecting families to care in their own communities.

If you have noticed something in a photo of your child, their guidance is simple and worth following.

What Know the Glow recommends if you think you see the Glow

1. Go into a dimly lit room, give your child’s eyes time to adjust, and take a flash photo.
2. Cover the non-glowing eye and ask your child to point to an object in a book.
3. Bring the photos to your pediatrician, say clearly what you have noticed, and ask for a red reflex exam.

That is their guidance, not ours, and anything beyond it belongs with your pediatrician or an eye specialist rather than with us. We are including it because it takes thirty seconds to read and we would rather you had it.

What we contributed

For the fundraiser auction, we donated four complimentary treatments, one for each of the technologies we are proudest of:

• XERF, our non-invasive radiofrequency treatment for structural skin tightening
• Onda Pro, advanced body contouring for localized fat, cellulite, and skin laxity
• Tetra Pro, laser technology for customized skin resurfacing
• PicoSure Pro, picosecond laser for concerns including pigmentation and tattoo removal

We also provided 100 gift certificates, one for each of the 100 gift bags prepared for guests.

We mention the specifics because people ask, not because the amount is the point. Everyone in that room gave something, and most of them gave more than we did.

Why this cause, for us

We think about the work we do as helping people feel at home in their own bodies. That is a comfortable thing to believe when your patients are adults choosing a treatment. It becomes a more serious thing to sit with when you are in a room full of people working on whether a child will be able to see.

Our clinic is built around the idea that care should reach people at every stage of life, and that catching something early is almost always better than treating it late. That principle runs through everything we do, from the imaging scan we do before planning any treatment to the conversations where we tell someone they do not need what they came in asking for. Know the Glow applies the same principle to something with far higher stakes.

There is also a simpler reason. We are a neighborhood clinic in the San Gabriel Valley, and our patients are parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Awareness of the Glow is the kind of thing that spreads through communities like ours by word of mouth, one person mentioning it to another. If this post results in one family looking more carefully at a photograph, it will have been the most useful thing we publish this year.

Thank you

Our thanks to Megan Webber for hosting, to Jenni Kayne Brentwood for the space, and to Know the Glow for the work they do and for letting us be a small part of this evening. Thanks as well to every donor and guest who turned up and gave.

Beauty is a good business to be in. It is a better one when it occasionally points at something other than itself.

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