Don't you dare: Social pressures (and everyday abuse) that ruin your eyes
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Loading... - King Thomas
- 01 Jun 2022
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An Optician's network on Spain's Costas has spoken out with concern about social media 'challenges' that could cause serious eye damage – in many cases, irreversible.
Their warnings also serve as good advice – for some of these foolhardy 'dares', at least – for the general population about what not to do with your eyes, such as avoiding exposure to bright lights.
Viral online trends involving putting yourself through unnecessary discomfort to get 'likes' and keep up with one's peers are nothing new, and before the dawn of internet, they tended to happen among friend or school class groups, making them much harder to avoid – and harder to escape the hassle from one's contemporaries if you refused to have anything to do with it.
But with social media, at least, you can log off for a bit, or pretend you haven't seen it.
The latest crop of these so-called 'challenges', on TikTok, is putting teens in danger of permanently ruining their sight whilst their bodies are still developing.
And again, they are nothing new per se – only the methodology; the 1980s' and 1990s' equivalent involved daring your classmates to stare into a Bunsen burner or magnesium light during science lessons, and kids who rose to it may now be regretting it as they pay their opticians' bill in their 40s.
Bright eyes, damaged vision: Keep toxic substances out of them
Dr Nigel Best of SpecSavers revealed one of the 'dares' involves filling a plastic bag with a combination of bleach, hand-sanitiser and shaving cream, and holding it up to their eyes to make them 'look brighter'.
“Simply don't do it!” Dr Best urges.
“Apart from the fact that it won't make your eyes any brighter, if the bag splits and the contents leak out, it could cause corneal scarring, extreme pain and blindness.”
There's no remedy for the wreckage of bleach or alcohol getting in your eyes, and it really, really hurts.
But if you get any of these substances in your eyes by mistake, rinse them out thoroughly with clean water and go and see an optician as fast as you can.
Lights, filter, double vision
Whatever colour your eyes are, they're beautiful, even – and especially, as it's so unique - if you're one of the rare people born with an eye in each colour, and the trick to making them look great is to coordinate your clothing, accessories and makeup to highlight and complement them.
The only way to change the colour of your eyes is by wearing coloured contact lenses, which is a lot safer than the 'challenge' of trying to turn your eyes blue on screen which is flooding TikTok at present.
This 'dare' involves shining a very bright light directly into your eyes whilst using the S5 filter on your phone.
“When exposed to bright lights, we would naturally avert our eyes and our pupils would constrict,” explains Dr Best.
For this reason, we would never focus our eyes on bright light unless we forced ourselves to do so – those whose jobs involve having to train in on brightness would wear protective goggles.
This natural response 'reduces the amount of potentially harmful light falling on the retina', Dr Best says.
The bright-light-S5-filter combination, forcing your retina to 'cope' with bright light it would normally try to avoid, means 'you risk permanently damaging the light-sensitive cells on it and causing blind spots', warns Dr Best.
For the general population, this is a sharp reminder of how important it is to wear sunglasses with properly-approved lenses during a Spanish summer, and ski goggles when skiing, snowboarding or even just hiking through snowy landscapes, because the light reflecting off the white stuff causes snow-blindness, which is extremely uncomfortable. Read More...
