A 41-year-old Idaho mom says a habit she barely thought twice about for nearly 20 years may have left her with a painful, incurable eye condition.
Sarah Koseki, of Boise, said she regularly went to bed without removing her eye makeup beginning around age 18. For years, she had no obvious problems.
Then in January 2021, while on a trip to Mexico, she woke up to a terrifying sensation.
Her eyelid was stuck to her eye.
“It was like Velcro,” Koseki said.
When she managed to pull her eyelid open, she felt a sudden, intense pain. She said she could not get comfortable with her eye open or closed and was unable to sleep.
“I was beside myself,” she said.
Koseki eventually went to an eye doctor after returning home and was told she had suffered a corneal tear, an injury to the clear surface covering the front of the eye.
The pain lasted for about two days, and she said it took roughly two weeks before her eye fully healed.
At first, doctors reportedly told her she simply had dry eyes caused by genetics or aging.
But the terrifying episodes kept happening.
Koseki said she began suffering corneal tears about once every three months. Each episode could leave her unable to see properly, drive, work or even read to her children for up to 48 hours.
“There are so many pain receptors in the eye; I would rather go through childbirth again than have another corneal tear,” she said.
During the worst episodes, Koseki said she would retreat to a dark room, put on a heated eye mask and listen to podcasts while waiting for the pain to pass.
She even tried holding her eyelids away from her eyes with her fingers and getting on all fours in hopes gravity would give her some relief.
Eventually, after suffering painful tears in both eyes, Koseki found a specialist who scanned the glands in her eyelids.
In August 2022, she was diagnosed with meibomian gland dysfunction, commonly called MGD.
The chronic condition happens when tiny oil-producing glands along the eyelids become blocked or fail to work properly. Those oils normally help protect tears from evaporating too quickly. When the glands malfunction, patients can develop severe dry eyes, irritation and damage to the surface of the eye.
Koseki said her doctor believed years of sleeping in eye makeup likely contributed to the problem by allowing cosmetics to clog the openings of the glands.
She admitted she had spent years wearing heavy eye makeup, including winged eyeliner, eyeshadow and eyeliner along the waterline.
“I went on a lot of nights out, and after nights out, and from age 18, I would just go to bed and sleep on my side, and the makeup would get into my meibomian glands,” she said.
Koseki believes her sleeping position may have made matters worse because she was repeatedly pressing one side of her face into her pillow.
“I’m also a side sleeper, so I’d be rubbing one eye at a time into my pillow every night, and pushing my makeup into my eyes,” she said.
She said she had always had good skin and never felt much pressure to develop a strict nighttime cleansing routine.
“Had I known it would lead to this, I would have implemented a nighttime face wash routine,” she said.
Since her diagnosis, Koseki has stopped wearing eye makeup almost completely. She said she now avoids mascara, eyeshadow and eyeliner and only occasionally uses concealer under her eyes.
“It’s too risky to wear eyeshadow or mascara, even if I were to wash it off,” she said.
She also follows a strict daily routine in an effort to keep her symptoms under control.
Koseki said she uses eye drops about six times a day, cleans around her eyes morning and night, uses a heated mask to help soften oils in the eyelid glands and applies an overnight eye ointment to keep her eyes moisturized.
“If I miss one day of my routine, my eyes get angry,” she said.
Her doctor also gave her special bandage contact lenses that can act as a protective shield over the eye when a corneal tear happens.
Koseki said the lenses have made a major difference.
“When I get a corneal tear, I pop one in, and it eases the pain by 75%,” she said.
She has also undergone IPL treatment, which uses pulses of light around the eyelids and cheeks in an attempt to improve clogged meibomian glands.
Koseki said she went about 18 months without another corneal tear after the treatment.
Still, there is no simple cure for MGD, and she said many of the treatments that help her are not covered by insurance.
“I’ve tried out 85,000 things to find out what works for my eyes,” she said.
“There’s no cure for it, which is the hardest thing, and anything that helps isn’t covered by insurance.”
She added, “The money I’ve spent on this is asinine.”
Koseki now hopes her experience serves as a warning to others who routinely fall asleep without removing their makeup.
What seemed like a harmless habit for years, she said, eventually became a painful condition that affects nearly every part of her daily life.
