I should add that “beauty products” are notorious for changing their ingredients with no warning, so it’s really no surprise that allergic reactions happen even if someone has used a product multiple times in the past with no problem.
I am allergic to certain brands of mascara and interestingly they are all the high end “expensive” brands like Estee Lauder, Clinique and Lancome. A couple of hours after applying them, my eyelids will start itching, then they become red and then my eyelids swell to the point of nearly closing shut and I end up looking like Rocky Balboa at the end of the first Rocky movie – seriously! Needless to say I don’t use any of those mascara brands anymore since I discovered which ones cause the reaction, although I use Estee Lauder foundation and their other products with no problems. I have no problem however with Cover Girl or Maybelline mascaras.
Allergies are interesting though as they can develop suddenly even to things that never caused an allergic reaction before and sometimes they also go away or lesson as we get older.
I knew a gal who was highly allergic to cats, to the point that she’d go into anaphylactic shock from handling or petting cats. But she loved cats and despite the risks, started taking in the neighborhood feral abandoned kittens, raising them and getting them spayed and neutered and finding homes for them while trying not to handle them too much. I thought she was crazy for doing so and especially when she decided to keep one and make him a house cat, but as time went on, she lost her allergy to them. That’s not to say completely, for instance brushing a cat sometimes caused her to sneeze and wheeze but nothing like the types of reactions she’d had been before.
I on the other hand never had seasonal allergies until about 10 years ago. And whatever I’m allergic to, it mostly effects me during the late fall and early winter months (I’ve been told it might be a tree spores or leaf mold allergy) and when it strikes me, it feels like a bad case of flu, complete with body aches and what feels like a fever, watery nose and sneezing to the point I can’t function and often get sent home from work because nobody wants to be around me, except it comes on extremely suddenly and typically goes away completely the next day. I am also highly allergic to poison ivy to the point if I get exposed, which I have many times, I end up having to go the doctor’s office and getting put on steroids.
I color my hair and I don’t apologize for it. When my hair grew back after chemo, it grew back steel gray. No way I am going to have gray hair yet. Solly Chally
Good for you! I’m not ready to go grey either.
I color my hair too and don’t apologize for it. I’m a natural redhead, a strawberry blonde and at 53 years old I still am - mostly. But like my mom, in my mid 30’s I starting turning “white” instead of “steel grey” especially at the hair line. The good thing with my natural hair color is that the “white” sort of blends in with my very natural light blonde highlights but the ever increasing amount of it over the years has tended to make my natural red hair look “washed out” and dull.
I just had my hair colored and cut last week and I love the job my new stylist did; after moving to PA and a long search for a really good stylist, I finally found her. The color is basically my natural strawberry blonde color but she also did some very subtitle highlights and the coloring “brightened” up my hair and gave it a more youthful shine.
I did however experiment with hair color in my mid 30’s when I first noticed I was starting to turn white. For several years I had my hair colored a much darker red; really a deep brownish, copper, auburn and I loved it – it was more dramatic without, with my fair skin tone, looking completely unnatural. But the effort in maintaining such a much different color got to be too much and too expensive. The nice thing about keeping my more natural color and just augmenting my natural highlights is that if I don’t get back to the hair stylist in 6 weeks, the change is very subtitle and probably no one notices the “white” except for me. But I notice and I don’t like it.