These highly realistic three-dimensional paintings are the handiwork of Italian artist Luca Luce. He’s a makeup artist by profession, but he uses his extensive knowledge of colors and shading to create surreal optical illusions on his own palm.

Luca is an ace at clever shadow placement and photorealistic drawing. He brings these two aspects into every artwork in his unique palm painting series, creating astonishing images that will make you to a double take. For example, he painted a jigsaw piece taken out of his palm, with a gaping hole left underneath. The whole image is so realistic, it really does look like a piece of his palm has been lifted and placed aside.

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Paying $100 for a donut seems crazy, but Donutopia is no ordinary confectionery, it’s a culinary masterpiece covered in 24-karat gold flakes and edible sugar diamonds. These treats are made with the finest ingredients, including $39 Bling H2O water.

“Each one takes three to five hours to make,” says Jeanne Kaminski, co-owner of Dolicious Donuts in West Kelowna, Canada, where the delectable donuts were invented. They were inspired by a loyal customer who wanted to use one of their creations to propose to his girlfriend. He asked for a cream-filled Bismarck donut to act as a pillow for the engagement ring, but they decided to make him something truly impressive. The first Donutopia got such positive feedback that they decided to include it on the menu.

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Nigel Richards is a beast when it comes to the game of Scrabble. He’s so good that he recently won the French Language Scrabble Championship without even speaking the language. ‘

“He doesn’t speak any French at all – he just learned the words,” Nigel’s friend Liz Fagerlund told the media. “He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French, I wouldn’t think.” No wonder they call him the ‘Tiger Woods of Scrabble’.

French journalist and self-confessed Scrabble lover Jean-Baptiste Morel wrote: “He doesn’t speak French, but he learned to play in our language by reading the words of the ODS (Official Scrabble Book) as if it were a sequence of letters to learn. The man, as well as having a perfect command of the vocabulary, possesses an impressive game tactic that allows him to leapfrog the competition.” Morel added that Richard had managed to win in spite of a “pretty rotten” draw of letters.

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If you love odd culinary combinations, then the ‘dausage’ is just the thing for you. The half-donut, half-sausage is a savory-sweet mash-up of pork or beef and jam or custard, invented by web developer and food lover Liam Bennett.

“I was inspired to invent the dausage by the success of the cronut and the duffin,” the 37-year-old from Wales said. “I love jam donuts, and I really love those products, but I wanted to make something a bit different, so I came up with the idea of trying a sausage. I was trying to think what else you could mix with a donut. I was looking at things that go well with sweet things, duck with plum sauce. I thought I’d give the sausage a go because, well, I eat sausages.”

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28-year-old Blut Katzchen, from Shreveport, Louisiana, recently made a shocking revelation – she allows self-proclaimed vampires to suck blood directly from her body!

There’s actually a term for people like Blut – they’re called ‘black swans’. Blut herself revealed that she’s been “entranced” with the whole vampire culture since she was very young. “I found a book on vampires in my sister’s collection and became completely entranced with it,” she said. “It takes a very specific type of mindset to enjoy being a swan – you have to be more submissive and enjoy giving.”

Blut’s latest admirer is 43-year-old Michael Vachmiel, from Houston, who claims that sucking her blood gives him a boost of energy. The duo met at a Vampire Ball two years ago, and have been meeting a few times a year ever since. “You have to have a very strong connection to the person who is feeding off you,” Blut explained.

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Buried deep inside the Indonesian jungle is a very odd structure, shaped like a giant chicken. The long abandoned construction, locally known as Gereja Ayam (Chicken Church), is a popular tourist attraction in the hills of Magelang, Central Java.

Word on the internet is this strange construction was designed to be a church, but according to its creator, the building is neither a chicken nor a church. Daniel Alamsjah, 67, revealed that he was working in Jakarta when he suddenly received a divine message from God to build a prayer room in the form of a dove. “Perhaps because of my Christian faith, people thought I was building a church,” he said. “But it’s not a church. I was building a prayer house, a place for people who believe in God.”

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Lots of people love Chipotle, but how many eat there every single day? According to recent news reports at least two. Mark Rantal and Andrew Hawryluk have been at the popular Mexican grill for over 100 days straight!

Rantal, 30, who has been eating at the restaurant for 108 days now, said he got into the practice by accident. “On Monday, I decided to get Chipotle and on Tuesday, I made the same decision, then got lunch with my friend there on Wednesday,” he told reporters. “We laughed about it at lunch and he asked how long I thought I could go. And that began the thought.”

Soon, Rantal hit one week, and then a month, and then he just kept going from there. “Every time I hit a milestone, it was very easy and convenient to imagine hitting the next,” he said. And he got the same meal every single time – a burrito bowl with white rice, pinto beans, fajitas, sofritas, mild salsa, corn, medium salsa, cheese and lettuce.

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3D-printed homes aren’t exactly new, but the rapid progress made in this new industry never cease to amaze us here at Oddity Central. Earlier this year we wrote about a Chinese company that used a specially designed 3D printer to create large ec0-friendly housing in record time. Another construction company has now perfected the process, making it possible to assemble a fully functional home in just three hours!

The revolutionary new technology was developed by Zhuoda Group, in Xi’an, central China. On July 17, they put up a two-storey sample villa built from pre-constructed components that were printed in a factory and later lifted into place using a crane. The instant villas cost only about 3,500 yuan ($564) per square meter, which is far lower than the current industry standard.

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Believe it or not, the villagers of Hokse, Nepal, are so poor that they’re forced to sell their own organs in order to make ends meet. The practice is so common there that the place has been nicknamed ‘Kidney Village’.

Organ brokers regularly visit the village and its surrounding areas and convince cash-strapped locals to part with one of their healthy kidneys. These agents are notorious for tricking innocent villagers into traveling to Southern India to have their operations. They cook up all sorts of tales, telling the poor villagers that humans only need one kidney for survival or that the organ, once removed, will grow back! That particular trick was used to fool Geetha, a mother-of-four who sold her kidney for only $2,000.

“For ten years people came to our village trying to convince us to sell our kidneys but I always said no,” Geetha said. But as her family grew, her desire to provide them with a house got stronger. “I have always wanted my own house and a piece of land, and with more children, I really needed it.” So she traveled with her sister-in-law, an organ broker, to India, and underwent the operation.

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Slugs are not what you’d normally call “cute” creatures, but the Jorunna Parva species is an exception. These marine slugs bear a striking resemblance to small rabbits, which has recently earned them the nickname ‘sea bunnies’.

Jorunna parva slugs were discovered by Japanese malacologist Kikutaro Baba in 1938, but the rest of the world has only become aware of their irresistible cuteness last year, when footage from a Japanese diving school was released online. The clip, featuring parva off the coast of Japan, has gone viral on the internet and people all over the world are going ga-ga over the adorable underwater creatures.

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The Yipao is a unique annual tradition in Colombia’s Coffee Triangle dedicated to the Willys Jeeps, the iconic American car the locals have been relying on since the 1940s.

For the people of Quindío district, Jeeps have been a source of livelihood and a significant part of daily life since the 1940s. The unpaved roads of the coffee mountains are filled with Jeeps that transport people and their belongings – including piles of coffee bags, livestock, harvested produce, and more. When families have to relocate, they often pile all their belongings onto one Jeep and move in a single trip.

Jeeps are such an integral part of life that they’re fondly known in Spanish as ‘mulitas mécanicas (mechanical mules). The country’s farmers use them to get to places that were previously accessible only by riding pack animals. Given how deeply Jeeps have impacted the life of locals, it’s only befitting that they pay homage to the vehicle during the annual Yipao parade.

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Chinese surgeons recently performed a bizarre surgery in order to save a man’s severed hand. They grafted it on to his ankle for a month, before reattaching it to his arm!

The innovative surgery was carried out on factory worker Zhou, from Changsha, China’s Hunan province. Zhou’s left hand was accidentally severed from his arm during an accident involving a spinning blade machine. He was immediately rushed to Xiangya Hospital, where Dr. Tang Juyu and his team realised that the damaged nerves and tendons needed time to heal. If they tried to attach the hand to his arm immediately, its cells would die from lack of blood supply.

“Under normal temperatures, a severed finger needs to resume blood supply within 10 hours, but that time is even shorter for a separated limb,” Tang explained. “If a limb is short of blood for too long, its tissues die and it will be unsalvageable.” Read More »

Armed with an X-acto knife and a pair of tweezers, Korean artist Yoo Hyun carves intricate, highly realistic portraits of celebrities. His paper-cut portraits look like abstract designs from up-close, but at a distance, the thin slits reveal the faces of movie stars, world leaders, and musicians.

Hyun’s signature style consists of zig-zag patterns, but he doesn’t carve in straight lines. Instead, he varies the thickness of each strip, to create facial features and expressions. Each line specifically adds to the three-dimensional illusion. The negative spaces are see-through, so layering the portrait over a colored surface or pattern adds even more depth. He mostly chooses a black ink-splattered surface, but sometimes he uses bold colors like blue and red to illuminate the portraits.

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A Russian woman is making headlines for her incredibly plastic life, modeled after the popular Barbie doll. Her bizarre life has earned her lots of nicknames on social media, including ‘Living Barbie’, ‘Real Doll’ and ‘Pink Lover’.

Looking at 28-year-old Tatiana Tuzova, it’s easy to see why people consider her to be a real-life Barbie – she’s as impossibly thin as the popular doll, has long blond hair and she’s always dressed in tiny pink frocks with puffed sleeves. Oh, and did I mention she drives a pink car with Barbie’s face plastered on it?

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I can think of few things more embarrassing for a man than getting an erection in public with no real way to conceal it. Luckily, with Bloxers, that doesn’t have to be a problem anymore.

From the outside, ‘Bloxers’ look just like regular boxers, but with the ability to ‘block’ an erection from public view. The makers of the revolutionary new product in men’s wear are currently raising money through crowdfunding site Indiegogo. They claim to be all about “happy men, sexually, emotionally, medically.”

“Our new product centers on keeping yourself or the men in your life from experiencing the negative effects of what is fundamentally a very good thing,” the brilliant minds behind Bloxers said. “It’s funny, innovative and ultimately for the better good.”

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