The Torah calls Leah's eyes rakkot — tender, soft, weak (Genesis 29:17). The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan reframes the entire verse. Her eyes were moist from weeping and praying before the Lord that He would not destine her for Esau the wicked.
In the tradition the Targum preserves, Laban and Rebekah were siblings. They had two daughters and two nephews to match. The elder nephew (Esau) was supposed to marry the elder daughter (Leah). The younger nephew (Jacob) was supposed to marry the younger daughter (Rachel). This was the arithmetic of the family.
Leah heard the plan and fell apart. She could not bear the thought of being married to Esau — the man who had sold his birthright for lentil stew, the man who had married Canaanite women, the man whose cruelty had already grieved Isaac and Rebekah. So she cried. For years. She cried so hard that her eyelashes thinned, her eyes reddened, her lids grew soft and damp. The biblical word rakkot is not cosmetic. It is the physical residue of a very long prayer.
And the prayer worked. Leah does not marry Esau. She marries Jacob — before Rachel does — and becomes the mother of Judah, from whom David will come, from whom the messiah will come.
The Torah calls her plain. The Targum calls her the woman whose tears bent the destiny of her life and the destiny of Israel. Rachel is yefat toar, beautiful; Leah is ba'alat tefillah, master of prayer.
The takeaway: do not mistake red eyes for weak eyes. Sometimes red eyes are the sign of a woman who prayed her way out of the future she was assigned.