Think back to the last time you went to town on a pimple. How satisfying and strangely…calming is it to finally get that sucker to explode it’s revolt pus. No? Just me then? Yeah, right. You’re absolutely lying.
As soul-soothing as blowing up a big pimp can be, we’re all super aware that picking your face isn’t exactly health 101. Tl;dr – hands carry gross bacteria, you’re literally creating an open wound on your face, wounds + bacteria are not great, etc etc.
In general though, we do some terrible shit to our faces. Along with popping zits, most of us use years-old beauty products, skip sunscreen (very, very bad), and don’t clean our makeup brushes as often as we should – if ever.
If you’re guilty of that last one, read on and allow this story to scare you shitless ’til you’re boiling all your brushes every hour on the hour. This week, Twitter user Katie Wright‘s vom-inducing experience with what she thought was a blind pimple went viral, after several makeup accounts picked up her terrible tale and struck fear into the hearts of makeup lovers worldwide.
Let’s start with Katie before the horror story went down, shall we?
And here’s Katie after she picked at what she thought was a simple, blind zit.
OH DEAR GOD NO. NOPE. NO. It gets worse. Here’s what Katie says happened to lead to this swollen-faced nightmare situation.
A week ago I decided to pick at what I thought was a giant under the skin pimple because it had been hurting for a while and got too painful to ignore. Within an hour my entire face swelled up and HURT. It felt like something was going to burst out of my skin. I went to the emergency room and they said it was a very serious case of Cellulitis, which is a version of a Staph infection, but instead of having a head like Staph, it effects the deep cellular tissues with no main source to attack. Since it was on my face, there was a huge risk of it spreading to my brain or my eyes causing me to go blind. Serious shit.
SPREADING. TO THE BRAIN. Get absolutely fucked.
Thankfully, Katie caught the Staph in time and all is well in her world. Her theory? The culprit was her eyebrow spooly brush – which she blanked on cleaning coz it’s attached to her brow pencil. While it’s a theory, it’s a pretty legit one – makeup brushes that aren’t properly cleaned regularly can definitely cause Staph infections.
Here’s her account in full.
Katie shared this video of her healed face after her OG post went viral, to reassure everyone.
https://twitter.com/katiewright/status/892182539212918784
“If you wear makeup PLEASE make that a step in your cleaning routine!!!!” she concludes in the original post. “It’s a small thing to do to avoid a painful, expensive, and traumatizing infection on your face.”
Brb, setting fire to all my makeup brushes and products and starting over.
