Tylah Durie, 16 years old, suffered a really horrible allergic reaction after she dyed her eyebrows by herself without doing any required preparations, the Daily Mail reports.
Durie, who’s from Victoria, resembled the face of a “frog” who’s about to be blind. She first noticed that her eyebrows were turning red and felt an itching and burning sensation.
She applied the dye kit called 1000 Hour’s Eyelash and Brow Dye 30 minutes before the reaction happened.
Durie said, “I woke up almost blind because of the reaction, my eyes had blown up like huge balloons, I was crying and screaming. It was like having beach sand thrown in your eyeballs and not being able to get it out, then a stinging like razor blades on my eyebrows.”
She continued, “My eyes were pretty much swollen shut, I could only see a tiny amount and my eyes were weeping with a lot of pus.”
Durie said that the terrifying chemical reaction on her eyes had her immediately taken to the hospital and she was very scared for her life. The doctors informed her that the allergy she had was “very unusual and severe” and she had a chance of being “permanently blind.”
Durie said, “I went through inexplicable pain just by tinting my eyelashes and eyebrows. I’m never using dye on myself ever again.”
She added, “No one really does the patch test in my family, so I thought I would be okay and hadn’t suffered any reactions when dying my hair in the past, but those dyes didn’t have PPD in them.”
Durie had no prior knowledge that she had a life-threatening allergy to one of the chemicals called Paraphenylenediamine (PPD). She would’ve known this if she just did her patch test.
Durie said that she only wanted to make her lashes and brows darker. She said, “When I applied the mixture I was fine, I waited ten minutes and then washed it off – it looked really good and was really pleased with it.”
She was prescribed antihistamines, which lessened the swelling. However, blisters started to form around her brows and eyelashes began to fall out.
Durie said, “I was in shock, I was crying and really stressed, I was terrified of losing my eyesight at such a young age. An optometrist the next day told me how lucky I was not to have gone blind and now I have to go to see them on a regular basis to monitor the last effects of the damage.”
Durie recommended to everyone that they should always do the patch test and learn from her botched situation.
She added, “I was really scared by what happened... once you get one reaction from PPD it gets worse and worse each time. If it happens again it could either kill me or leave me permanently blinded.”
Gina Taro, an allergy specialist, explained, “Reactions can be as small as redness around the edges of your face to itching of the eyes, all the way to chemical burns, blisters and your whole scalp feeling like it’s melting off.”
Taro continued, “Some people can suffer anaphylactic shock, where you have a small window before your throat closes and you die of suffocation, people have died because of PPD.”
Taro suspected that the intensity of the reaction depends on how much color dye enters into the bloodstream due to the person’s micro-abrasions.
She added, “The reactions will become more severe the more times you’re exposed to it, it’s like giving your child peanut butter when they are allergic to peanuts.”
Jodie Phillips, a spokesperson for the Chemcorp Pty Ltd who manufactures the 1,000 Hour product, said, “It is well known that some people can be very sensitive to the ingredient and hence may find that such products are not compatible with their skin.”
Phillips continued, “For this reason, all coloring products contain very specific and clear instructions that the consumer should carry out a patch test before using the product especially on sensitive areas such as eyebrows and lashes.”
Phillips also insisted that a patch test should be done 48 hours before fully using the dye. She also claimed that this was the first time they received information about a customer being hospitalized due to the allergy.
She said, “The young lady must have had a serve reaction and I do truly hope that she makes a full recovery.”
