Of all the beauty habits we don’t give a second thought to, wearing a hair tie around our wrists probably ranks pretty high up there.
But for one woman, that mindless move led to some serious repercussions.
According to WLKY, one Kentucky woman acquired a dangerous infection from wearing a glitter hair tie around her wrist. Doctors say that the glitter got under Audree Kopp’s skin through her pores and hair follicles, leading to a staph infection that could’ve turned deadly.
Kopp said that she noticed a growing red bump that she thought was a spider bite. Doctors put her on antibiotics, but that didn’t solve the problem. When doctors finally figured out what it was, Kopp had to undergo surgery to drain the infection.
“Be careful,” Dr. Amir Gupta at Norton Healthcare, who treated the patient, told WLKY. “I mean, you can’t put all these hair ties around the wrist particularly because it can cause problems to the skin; it can cause infection.”
“Once it gets into your bloodstream, people have been known to go into a coma, your body shuts down and it could have been way worse,” Kopp says after the harrowing experience. “The glitter tie is the one that caused the issue. Please share this, because I’m pretty sure about 90 percent of us females don’t think twice about keeping hair ties on our wrists. (Obviously I won’t be doing it anymore).”
