There is a surprising amount of disagreement in scientific studies about how common dry disease is around the world. Some studies find that almost half of people deal with dry eyes while others find that closer to 5% of people deal with this ailment. However, even if only 5% of the world is dealing with dry eyes, that is still about 350 million people!
Of course, that number could be a lot smaller if more people understood the importance of eyelid hygiene. Unfortunately, not only do not many people not think that eyelid hygiene is important, they don’t even realize that eyelid hygiene is a thing. Many people don’t learn about how eyelids can become naturally unclean without proper care until they start to deal with dry eyes or other ailments.
So what exactly is eyelid hygiene about, and why is it so important? Read on to learn all about the most important things to understand about eyelid hygiene!
What Does Your Eyelid Do?
Not everybody stops to think about what the eyelid even does. However, there is no denying that it performs an essential function. After all, anything that protects a part of the body as important as the eye is also important.
Eyelids protect your eyes by covering them when necessary. However, they also constantly wipe your eyes clean via blinking. The blinking process also helps to keep your eyes moisturized.
That moisturization is essential. After all, anything wet that is frequently exposed to the air will naturally become dry if it is not constantly moisturized.
Unfortunately, your eyelids are a very sensitive part of the body. This makes sense when you stop to think about their structure. Eyelids are extremely thin.
In fact, eyelids have the thinnest skin in the whole human body. Their tiny thickness has to contain layers of muscle, fat, blood vessels, ligaments, and more.
That means that their delicate nature is also combined with extremely complex construction. Together, this leaves your eyelids vulnerable to complications.
What Is Dry Eye Disease?
One of the most common complications with eyelids is dry eye syndrome. The tear ducts are especially responsible for keeping your eyes moisturized. However, they sometimes fail to produce a sufficient quantity of tears.
When this happens, your eyes can become chronically dry. That dryness can lead to inflammation and irritation. Unfortunately, that can then lead to a vicious cycle that perpetuates and exacerbates your dry eyes.
Dry eye diseases are characterized by red eyes that constantly water. That excess of water can lead to blurred vision.
The sensitivity of irritated eyes can also mean that people with dry eye syndrome are especially sensitive to light. They might start to dim the lights or wear sunglasses more often.
Unfortunately, dry eye disease can also make it very difficult to wear contact lenses. That leaves many people dealing with natural imperfections in their sight on top of their dry eyes.
On the other hand, you can sometimes resolve dry eye disease by simply remembering to blink more often. This might sound silly, but it actually makes more sense than you might think.
These days, many people spend many hours of the day staring at screens. Not everybody knows this, but people tend to blink much less frequently when looking at a screen.
Simply remembering to blink at a normal rate can sometimes resolve dry eyes. In other cases, people can use artificial tears to make up for the lack of tears coming from their tear ducts.
How Can Eyelids Become Dirty?
Dirty eyelids can also trigger dry eye disease. Proper eyelid hygiene is essential to ward off dry eye disease and other potential problems with your eyes.
When you think about it, it is inevitable that your eyes will encounter a certain amount of debris. Your skin and your hair are constantly shedding cells that can easily land in your eye.
On top of that, it is normal to develop eye crusts while sleeping. In other cases, conditions like rosacea can lead to eyelids suffering from poor hygiene.
You can generally detect eyelids with poor hygiene because they will look and feel greasy. They may also cause dry skin in their vicinity, leading to skin flaking off near your eyes.
You might also find that your eyelashes are coated in crusts of some kind, causing them to point in odd directions. You might also detect poor hygiene in eyelids by a compulsion to blink more often than usual.
Understanding Eyelid Mites
It is natural to have eyelash mites on your eyelashes. However, if you do not practice good eyelid hygiene, these mites can multiply. In sufficient quantities, they can start to cause blepharitis and the symptoms we have discussed before.
They can also lead to itchiness around your eyes and a feeling of burning on your eyelids.
How to Improve Eyelid Hygiene
Fortunately, keeping your eyelids clean is a simple process. All you really have to do is carefully wash them with water. In some cases, you might want to add a gentle cleaning solution, but that is not usually necessary.
You also need to be careful to avoid getting makeup in your eyes.
The more that you understand about eyelid hygiene and how to keep your eyelids clean, the more you might appreciate the right tools for helping you maintain healthy eyelids. Knowing how to keep your eyelid healthy often comes down to finding the right meds for dry eyes. Not everybody appreciates the importance of eyelid hygiene, but it becomes obvious once you start to deal with dry eyes.
Understand the Importance of Eyelid Hygiene
We hope learning more about eyelid hygiene has been helpful for you. Eyelids are one of the parts of the body that not everybody learns how to keep clean in the course of ordinary life. Many people don’t realize that eyelid hygiene is important until they start to suffer ailments due to poor eyelid hygiene.
Understanding more about eyelid hygiene can help you avoid health problems with your eyes. To learn more about the latest information in health, technology, and more, take a look through our other pages!
