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I’ve been on a kick lately to take better care of my skin. I’m in my thirties, I’ve accepted that I’m aging, and there are things I can do to age more gracefully, shall we say.

It’s all fun and games until your eyes swell shut! Yup, I changed my facial routine and ended up looking like Rocky Balboa for a day…

About The Time My Eye Swelled So Badly I Looked Like Rocky Balboa

Top of the list has been to smear my face in all the skin care things. All of them!

Spoiler, this is a really bad idea.

The best practice is to introduce a new product and give that one product a two week trial run. See how your skin takes it, if it works for you or if it creates other problems. That is the smart thing to do.

I tried to do that. I swear.

First I started out with a drugstore kit for dealing with acne. It had a cleanser, toner and moisturizer. I figured it had to be pretty run of the mill stuff and was an okay place to start. I used it for a few weeks along with another moisturizer I was really liking.

Then… My neck started to itch. I didn’t realize it until at the end of a long day I looked in the mirror and there were long, red scratch marks down my neck.

What the heck?

I immediately stopped the whole routine and went back to my regular make-up remover wipes and a gentle moisturizer I’ve used off and on for years.

After about a week the dryness cleared up. A little testing of my other products led me to believe the culprit was one, or all, of the acne kit. I put it in a drawer and ignored it for two whole weeks. Two weeks!

About a week ago I was washing my face, and thought–why not test it? Just to see? I mean, what’s the worst that would happen? I’d get itchy, right?

If I could go back in time and slap myself I would.

That night I opted to just apply the moisturizer. Just to test it out. I wanted to see what would happen.

The next morning I woke up to complete darkness. After a moment of flailing around and mutterings of, “Oh crap,” from my fiance I figure out that it’s not the lights that aren’t working.

It was my eyes. They’d swollen shut.

So there I am, face itchy and swollen, unable to see, all because I just wanted to make sure that this one product I was pretty sure wasn’t good for me, really wasn’t good for me. Guess what? It wasn’t. Yeah. Live and learn, and then slather yourself in coconut oil!