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Tylah Durie, 16, is a beauty student who is passionate about makeup and maintaining her look each day. One of her biggest pride and joys is her brows, which she has always been careful to pluck, wax, and tint just to keep them looking good.
When she went to the store one time, she discovered a new product that claimed it would darken the brows and make them more prominent.
As a beauty student, Durie was instantly curious and wanted to try the product for herself. She bought the eyebrow tint, and noticed that the instructions advised new users to do a “test patch” to ensure they wouldn’t suffer from allergic reactions. But she chose to ignore it.
Instead, she simply applied the product as directed.
Durie let the product sit on her brows for ten minutes, per the instructions, and then washed it off to inspect the effects.
She initially was rather impressed. “It looked really good and I was really pleased with it,” she reported.
But about 30 minutes later, Durie began to feel a slight itching and burning on her brows. She didn’t think too much of it – until she woke up the next morning, barely able to open her eyes.
Durie had actually been allergic to one of the active ingredients in the eyebrow tint: paraphenylenediamine. Using it on her brows triggered a serious allergic reaction that caused her eyes to begin swelling.
“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 razorblades on my eyebrows,” Durie recalled.
“My eyes were pretty much swollen shut, I could only see a tiny amount and my eyes were weeping with a lot of puss. My mum said I looked like a big frog because my eyebrows had folded over and my eyes were horribly swollen. It had swollen into a large rock-hard area and was completely numb.”
Durie’s mother took her to the hospital, where doctors warned her that she could have even gone blind from her naïve application of the new product. Thankfully, Durie’s reactions were responsive to antihistamines and she was told she would eventually be fine – but not before her body rode out the wave of the reaction.
For the next four days, Durie watched as her eyes swelled and then her brows began to blister. Next, her eyelashes began to fall, and her eyes leaked pus and tears constantly.
“I was in shock, I was crying and really stressed, I was terrified of losing my eyesight at such a young age,” Durie said.
We are relieved to report that Durie is now doing fine.
The dye did, however, cause chemical burns on her eyeballs, which can make any subsequent contact with the chemical perephenylenediamine become fatal. She will have to visit her optometrist to monitor the damage that was done, but Durie is feeling stronger now.
Now, she’s speaking out about the importance of doing a test patch before using any new product and hoping to share the graphic photos of her own reaction to warn others.
