One woman reveals the harrowing reason you should never sleep with makeup on

Online video platforms or social media sites are full of make-up tutorials these days. Tips and tricks on every tiny little thing imaginable, but a lot of videos forget to highlight the importance of an extremely important part of wearing make-up, taking it off.

Theresa Lynch, from Sydney, paid the price for this, as a study published in the Ophthalmology magazine and printed by the American Academy of Ophthalmology revealed. Suffering from an unpleasant irritation in her eyes, the woman went to see Dana Robaei, an ophthalmology specialist at the Save Sight Institute at the University of Sydney.

However accustomed to complex ophthalmology conditions she may have been, the specialist diagnosed the patient with a condition that she had never seen before.

A significant examination

After lifting up the fifty-year old’s eyelids, the ophthalmologist then discovered a collection of small spherical clumps of mascara located in the mucous membrane which coats the inside of the eyelids, the conjunctiva. And all because she had followed a make-up routine for a quarter of a century that was improper, to say the least.

After decades of sleeping with make-up on, the patient had developed lots of small clumps of solidified mascara that had become embedded into the underside of her eyelid. The ophthalmologist explained:

She had been heavily using mascara on her eyelashes for more than 25 years without removing it properly.

As a result, whenever she blinked, these clumps would rub against her eyeball and end up causing a severe irritation in the patient's cornea. This ended up leading to an unpleasant and uncomfortable feeling as she described in an interview she gave to the Daily Mail:

The symptoms are like someone throwing a handful of sand in your eye, it’s constantly irritating.

A problematic mix

The ingredients that mascara consists of include oils, waxes and pigments that are likely – when not properly removed at the end of the day – to move from the eyelashes to the surface of the eyeball. Some products also contain synthetic fibres which are even more likely to move. In the case of Australian Theresa Lynch, these compounds had become trapped under her eyelids in specific immune cells, macrophages that are capable of “phagocyting” – meaning “ingesting” foreign substances.

After an hour and a half long operation, the ophthalmologist managed to remove the clumps that had gathered under the patient’s eyelids, who will now have to live with permanent scarring on the surface of her eyeballs and on the underside of her eyelids.

But what assures make-up tutorial fans is that this medical case was quite rare, as the Australian specialist assured:

This was an amazing case. I’d never seen anything like it. But this is a risk not many people are aware of.

This was a point of view that was shared by the patient, who finally gives some sensible advice:

It’s so important to properly take your make-up off every single night. You can’t miss a single day.