There is no doubt that the preservative benzisothiazolinone (a derivative of isothiazolinone, used in many liquid products such as shampoos, conditioners, liquid soaps, fabric conditioners, washing liquids, cleaning products etc.) caused the skin under my eyes to swell up. As the months went on I started to get facial swelling in the mornings, in addition to the swollen eyes. Only until I threw away the fabric softener and washed my sheets and pillow cases without fabric softener did the facial swelling stop. It stopped very soon afterwards.
After I stopped using fabric softener, my facial swelling went totally away and the swelling under my eyes diminished. However it did not totally go away. In the mornings, I sometimes had a swollen eye upon waking that got better as the day progressed.
It was only until I started drinking more water during the day, did the badly swollen eye upon waking up go away. I believe over a course of a year or two, I may have become chronically dehydrated by drinking lots of tea and coffee and not drinking enough tap water. I read on a website that chronic dehydration increases your levels of histamines and can amplify the effects of allergies.
The only troubling thing is that my face is still a little asymmetrical. I guess having a swollen eye for the best part of a year will have stretched the skin.
It was rather worrying to wake up one morning with a swollen eye that stayed for months and then progressed onto rather scary facial swelling. This went on for the better part of a whole year until I read a newspaper article about the problems of isothiazolinone, methylisothiazolinone, methylchloroisothiazolinone and benzisothiazolinone and eliminated cleaning products containing them from my home. It would have been nice to have some help from the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, but the GPs I saw couldn’t care less. Waiting weeks to see a GP for only a few minutes isn’t enough time to make a diagnosis. They should have referred me to a dermatologist as they could not make a diagnosis. If the GPs listened to what I said about the timing of events or bothered to question me, then the problem could have been identified much sooner.
One Puffy Eye 