In today’s post, we’re going to be talking about some of the reasons why your eyes may appear red and not quite as white as you’d like.
That’s quite common for people to come in and see me about their eyes being not quite as white as they like and we’ve all seen those that model photos and those glossy magazines where everybody’s eyes are positively white without a blood vessel insight, just to be sure, you guys, that’s pretty unnatural and it’s quite normal for most of us to have some blood vessels visible on the white of the eye.
Now, in situations where your eyes are red, then the cause here will be because there are more permanent and dilated blood vessels. Get the fact that those blood vessels aren’t there and everything looks nice and white, it does portray an image of an altogether healthier eye but the reality is that it is quite normal for us to have few blood vessels that are visible on the white of the eye.
Now, in situations where you’ve got quite a lot of blood vessels that are permanent and are dilated, then it will give your iron overall more pink, a hue and a pink look on the surface of the eye.
Now, there are several reasons why this may be the case and we’re going to get into that right now. Now, break down the reasons why your eyes may not be quite so white into temporary causes and also into chronic or long term causes.
Now, probably by a further common cause of your eyes not to be quite as red is soreness caused by dry eyes, and dry eyes is a condition where the surface of the eye starts to dry out because the tears evaporating too quickly or in the rare case, you may not be producing quite enough tears, and this leads to the blood vessels kind of becoming more permanent in an attempt to supply the area with more oxygen and also it may be a response due to inflammation.
Of course, the other issue that makes cause your eyes to be not quite as red would be inflammatory conditions such as iritis or pink eye, and of course, these are disease processes and require you to get professional help to deal with this. So this is something that you probably wouldn’t be worried about as just a cosmetic issue because you have other symptoms such as pain, soreness of your eyes, discomforts and things like that as well.
When it comes to some of the more chronic ongoing causes of your eyes being red and not being quite as white as you like, then we’d be mainly concerned about whether the blood vessels are dilated because of cardiovascular problems, such as high blood pressure and this situation. It’s always important to make sure that your doctor can confirm that your blood pressure is under control and that your cholesterol and general health and everything else is fine as well.
Now, aside from that, if your blood vessels have been red for as long as you can remember, then it may well be a normal thing for you may well be physiological as we describe it in this situation.
Then it’s important to, first of all, not to worry about the fact that your eyes aren’t quite as red as in the magazines or quite as red as anybody else but there may well be situations that are causing your normal kind of blood vessels that are fairly permanent to become even more permanent in certain situations.
Many of these issues, just like dry eyes, can be pinpointed to environmental factors. So, for example, if you spend a lot of time in a really dry environment, air-conditioned environment, a dusty environment, then those can be issues that lead to your blood vessels dilating a bit more being more permanent, and you need to deal with some of those environmental factors to try and get your blood vessels in a more relaxed state in a state where they aren’t constantly permanent and dilated.
Now, in my experience, for many people, it’s reassurance enough to know that their eyes are perfectly healthy and that the slight redness that they may have isn’t due to anything sinister or anything that’s going to lead to problems with their eyes.
Now, I do understand it’s quite natural for many people to want their eyes to be as white as possible, and they’ll look at options such as medications and drugs to try and get their eyes as wide as possible.
Generally, I recommend that if you can do without this, I would recommend not to be relying on and using products like this to get your eyes as wide as you possibly can and the reason is that these products are designed to be vasoconstrictors. That means that they construct your blood vessels and for the most part, many of these products just don’t have a good track record from kind of health point to view in terms of keeping your eyes consistently white, particularly you’re using drops based around a drug called phenylephrine, or epinephrine that constrict blood vessels and this does have issues in terms of the fact that the effect is only short term, doesn’t last for weeks and weeks.
So you may then also have issues where you get this rebound effect a bit like trying to cram a suitcase with lots of clothes for your holidays and only to find that the suitcase burst open, everything comes out you get this rebound effect where your blood vessels in response to this medication constricting the blood vessels of the eye they then kind of stop working and start doing the opposite and you may get even redder eyes, as a result, avoid anything based around those kinds of drugs.
There are, however, new generations of eye drops now that work differently and can be a lot more kind of localized and specific to the eye because one of the concerns of epinephrine based products as well is that if you have kind of vascular problems, then this could affect other blood vessels in the eye and the body as well, perhaps in theory.
So having this new generation of products that try and be more specific and strict the impact to just the eye is a better way to go they don’t produce some of the issues however, again, like anything else, if you don’t need to be taking drugs, then I wouldn’t recommend using that, I certainly not an ongoing basis if it’s something you might want to do because of an event or something like that, then perfectly understandable now I’d recommend speaking to your eye care professional about these and get in a recommendation of safe products that you can use different countries have different availabilities of a range of different things. It’s perhaps something I can cover in another post and going a bit more detail about what I might recommend and what I wouldn’t.
So let me know if that’s interesting to you, leave me a comment in the comment section. What do you think about eye whitening products, whether it’s something you’ve used and whether you’ve had any come back from that at all?
Thank you so much for reading.
Take care.
