CLEAN THOSE EYELIDS!

If you do not want to read the entire post, here are the salient points:

Your eyelids, like your teeth and skin, get dirty.
Clean your eyelids at least once a day.
Our eyes are resilient, but they need tender care.
We recommend Zocular products for daily lid hygiene.

We all know the importance of brushing our teeth. Without daily oral hygiene, the risk for teeth cavities, gingivitis, and other periodontal diseases increases, not to mention having bad breath. Even under the worst circumstances, it’s generally easier to replace teeth than eyes. But how many of us perform daily lid hygiene?

Our eyelids constantly produce oil, water, and other buildups, and microbes love to make this area home. But we’re often too afraid to touch our eye because it’s our eye after all, the most crucial organ we possess. We may also be confused by the multitudes of products available to clean the eyelids, which will be the subject of another blog post. With Zocular, it’s easy to do lid hygiene – any of our eye care products will work well, from ZocuFoam to ZocuWipe to ZocuShield. And every product contains our patented activated okra complex to clean your eyelids effectively without harshness or irritation.

Rest assured that our eye is one tough organ. Unless we’re in the ER or have experienced it firsthand, a tennis ball strike to the eye is much more likely to break the bones around our eyes than to rupture the eye. Our eyelids blink millions of times without thinning or wearing down like ceramic brakes on our car. The microanatomy of the eye prevents drugs from penetrating, and it’s this same architecture that protects our eyes against microbial infection. Clinically, eye infections are pretty rare in the eye clinic, and antibacterial drops are overprescribed for redness, swelling, and pain due to inflammation rather than infection. Doctors will usually ask a few questions to determine if there is an actual infection:

Was there trauma to the eye?
Is there a recent history of contact lens use?
Is there any underlying history of immune disorders?
Do the eyelids show any anatomic irregularities or deformities?
Are there any foreign bodies, surgical implants, or surgery on the eye?

If the answers to the above questions are all negative, the risk of a true eye infection is low. Note how each of these questions tries to elicit the risk for injuries to the eye that can break down the natural barriers against infection. But we’ve digressed. Let’s get back to how we should clean our lids.

First off, start cleaning your lids at least daily. If all you have is baby shampoo, use this at first until you purchase Zocular – sorry for the shameless plug; this is a Zocular blog. By lid hygiene, the cleaning should be directed at the lash line near the lid margin. Washing your face helps and is better than nothing, but it is not a replacement for daily lid cleaning. Gently scrub the lash line by using horizontal motions across the closed eyelids. Don’t be too aggressive with scrubbing by pushing down hard on the lids or moving so quickly across that you can light a fire. It’s better to allow a cleansing solution like ZocuFoam to soak rather than apply mechanical force. Let the Zocular product do the work for you. Our eyes only need 30-40 seconds of daily lid hygiene to see and feel better!