My agony as a microbead in face scrub got stuck in my eye
A WOMAN was left in agony after a microbead embedded itself in her eye.
Gail Hart, 43, was using Garnier Pure Active Deep Pore Wash when she felt an intense discomfort in her right eye and a scratching feeling against her eyeball.
The graphic designer went to hospital where doctors had to scrape the bead out with a needle because it was stuck in her cornea.
A medic told her he had seen other cases like hers of patients getting the tiny balls of plastic caught in their eyes.
Miss Hart said microbeads should be banned. The Daily Mail’s Ban The Beads Now campaign has called for them to be removed from beauty products after supermarkets banned them in rinse-off, but not wash-off versions.
The UK dumps 86 tonnes of microbeads in the sea every year, where they collect in the bodies of marine life including fish, birds and crabs. Some experts believe the beads can enter the food chain. Miss Hart, of Iver, Buck- inghamshire, had been using the exfoliating face product for a while before the incident last month. She returned from the gym one day and washed her face.
Afterwards, she could feel a scratchy object in her eye, so she went to her GP who sent her to a walk-in centre. There, doctors put orange dye into her eye and examined through a magnifying lens. They found a microbead in her cornea and transferred her to King Edward Hospital’s eye clinic in Windsor, Berkshire.
Doctors then used needles to scrape the bead out of her cornea using an anaesthetic spray. They gave her a course of antibiotics and eye gel to help it heal.
Miss Hart said: ‘The microbead left a crater in my cornea the size of the microbead. The discomfort was awful. It was like a sharp object was scratching my eye continuously.
‘It gave me that horrible anxiety where you think it’s never going to come out. At first I didn’t realise what was in it. I wash my face daily, but you’re only meant to exfoliate every now and then. It was a painful and terrifying experience. The doctor said he’d seen other patients with the same problem.’
She said that the process to remove the bead had worried her.
‘When they told me they had to get a needle into my eye, I freaked out. But luckily it was numb and I didn’t feel a thing,’ she added. ‘I cannot believe it’s left a crater.’
Miss Hart has contacted Garnier to complain about the product but she is yet to hear back from them.
She added that she had been unaware that the product contained microbeads. ‘I didn’t know the wash was bad for the environment – I didn’t even know microbeads were plastic,’ she said. ‘I thought it’s bio-friendly and will break down, but they don’t. I was reading up about them … They’re terrible for the animals.
‘I think microbeads should be banned – not just because of what happened to me but also because of the environment.’
She said doctors had confirmed that it was a microbead in her eye and she had not used any other products with them in and had experienced discomfort as soon as she had washed her face.
Stuart Hemingway, a consultant nurse who treated her, said that he had since seen another woman with the same complaint, adding that it is ‘clearly a problem’. The £4.99 200ml product is on sale online.
A spokesman for L’Oreal, which makes the face wash, said it was using a new formula without microbeads which was being rolled out across the country.
They added: ‘Garnier’s number one priority is the safety of our consumers. We are very sorry to hear of Gail’s experience and we are reaching out to her to understand what has happened and how we can help. With any type of scrub we advise against using the product around the eye … this advice is clearly communicated on the packaging.’