Chances are you’ve heard the edict “never sleep in your makeup” approximately a million times in your life. If the prospect of waking up to acne (not to mention full-on raccoon eyes) wasn’t enough to get you to walk the 15 feet into the bathroom to give your face a once-over with a cleansing wipe before your head hits the pillow, here’s another reason: sleeping with your makeup still on could potentially cause you to go blind.
As New York reports, a new study from the American Academy of Ophthalmology told the story of a 50-year-old Australian woman who went to the eye doctor after experiencing pain and irritation in her eyes. When the doctors flipped up her top eyelids to take a look underneath, they found solid masses called “concretions” that were comprised of 25 years’s worth of mascara buildup that hadn’t been properly removed.
According to the study, the doctors told her that if the masses had gotten infected, they could have caused her to go blind. In her case, they were able to safely remove the concretions in a 90-minute procedure, which unfortunately resulted in permanent scarring. (While far from ideal, this scenario by all accounts preferable to permanent loss of eyesight or more severe eye health-related complications.)
“Gritty eyeshadow, chunky mascara, and flaky eyeliner might irritate the eye and the eyelash roots which can lead to redness and ingrown lashes,” New York City-based dermatologist Ellen Marmur told Teen Vogue. While she stresses that your fave products have to pass some pretty rigorous safety standards before they hit shelves, she still urges you to take precaution.
“To remove eye makeup before you sleep, use something gentle like Beautycounter Instant Eye Makeup Remover or Neutrogena Oil Free Makeup Remover,” she explains. However, Marmur points out that it is unlikely that sleeping in your eye makeup will directly cause blindness; a condition like the one in the aforementioned study is a result of decades of improper care, and is by no means an isolated incident.
In case all of this wasn’t enough to convince you to never, ever to sleep in your makeup again, there is photographic evidence of the mascara in the study. (Warning: The images in the journal are pretty graphic.) And while the pictures can be hard to look at, it’s important to make sure that instances like these don’t happen, and that thorough cleansing habits become a part of any makeup-wearer’s routine — no matter how late an all-nighter you’re pulling.
Originally created from here.