Scientists are warning against falling asleep with your mascara on after one 50-year-old woman in Sydney, Australia, developed significant eye problems.
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The woman, Theresa Lynch, admitted to heavily using mascara on her lashes for 25 years without adequately removing the product before bed.
Over the years, bits of mascara had accumulated inside her eyelids and resulted in solidified concretions and chronic inflammation, researchers said. Doctors spent about 90 minutes surgically removing the mascara lumps from her eyes, leaving her eyelid and cornea permanently scarred.
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"It's so important to properly take your makeup off every single night. You can't miss a single day," Lynch told the Daily Mail. "I should never have let it get this far."
According to opthalmic surgeon Dana Robaei, who treated Lynch and authored a recent study published in the journal Opthalmology, the infections could have left her blind.
Here are some helpful mascara use and removal tips to keep in mind:
Take off all your makeup every single night.
Don’t fall asleep with mascara, or any eye makeup products, on your face.
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Don’t use face wash to remove eye makeup.
Dermatologist Jeanine Downie told Marie Claire that face wash won't actually remove potent formulas common in waterproof mascara and may actually leave a damaging residue on your lashes.
How to remove mascara:
You can use makeup pads, baby wipes, cotton balls (or cotton swabs) and makeup remover to remove waterproof mascara. Popular remover products include Almay's Oil-Free Gentle Eye makeup removal pads, opthalmalogist Jessica Lattman told Health.com.
Another cost-effective way to remove the product is to use petroleum jelly. Just coat your lashes with the jelly and remove it with a cotton ball or pad gentle soaked in warm water.
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Baby oil, olive oil, grape seed oil and coconut oil also prove handy in removing waterproof mascara and other eye makeup.
"After you've saturated a pad with product, press it down around your eye and allow it to dissolve so that less rubbing will be necessary," Marie Claire reported. "When massaging the product around your eyes, do so in a circular motion and *always* be sure to wipe downward."
Avoid using eyeliner along the waterline if you’re wearing mascara.
According to Health.com, "touching the liner to the inside of your lids introduces any bacteria lingering on your products directly to your eyeballs."
Don’t overuse waterproof mascara.
As effective as waterproof mascara is, give your eyes a break from all the product and the follow-up eye makeup-removal process every now and then.
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Replace your mascara every three months.
Your favorite tube of mascara is a hotbed for infectious bacteria. "The moist, dark environment inside of the mascara tube combined with normal daily eye secretions that get transferred from the mascara wand to the tube creates the perfect place for bacteria to grow," Dr. Jody Krukowski of the University of Kansas Medical Center's Department of Integrative Medicine told Bustle.
She and other experts recommend replacing the product every three months to avoid bacterial overgrowth.
