Hair Dye Caused Woman to Go Temporarily Blind

A French woman’s dye job inadvertently turned out to be perilous for her vision. In a new case report this week, the woman’s doctors describe how she began to experience retinal detachment and vision loss soon after using hair dye containing certain chemicals. Thankfully, her eyesight returned to normal over time once she stopped using the product and she was able to continue safely coloring her hair using different ingredients.

Doctors at the Edouard Herriot Hospital and the LEO Ophthalmological Center in France reported the eye-catching medical tale Thursday in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology. According to the paper, the 61-year-old woman visited the doctors a few days into developing blurry vision in both eyes. Tests confirmed that her symptoms were caused by damage to her retinas—the layers of cells in the back of the eye that capture light and convert it into the information needed for us and our brains to process vision.

The woman had no existing medical history that would explain this retinal damage, also known as retinopathy, and the doctors failed to find other common causes of it in their tests, such as infection or cancer. But the woman did mention that just before her symptoms began, she had recently used a store-bought hair dye that contained the chemical para-phenylenediamine.

Para-phenylenediamine belongs to a group of chemicals known as aromatic amines. And as luck would have it, the doctors were aware of other recent cases of middle-aged women experiencing retinopathy associated with the use of hair dye containing aromatic amines (shortened to RAHDAA). Given the timing of her eye trouble, and the lack of any other clear alternative explanation, they determined that the woman had developed her own case of RAHDAA.

RAHDAA resembles another form of retinopathy tied to the use of anti-cancer drugs that inhibit the activity of MEK proteins. Both these drugs and aromatic amines may cause retinal damage by interfering with a pathway important to the survival and homeostasis of retinal pigment epithelial cells, the authors say. The condition does appear to be rare, though people who have scalp wounds while using hair dyes with aromatic amines could be at higher risk, based on case reports (the woman in this case did not have such wounds).

As for the woman, her story has an eventual happy ending. She immediately stopped using the dye, and within four months time, her vision returned to normal, with no sign of retinal detachment. At a check-up four years later, the woman reported that she had switched to amine-free hair dye and tests confirmed that her vision remained as good as ever, though she did seem to still have some lingering, if asymptomatic, changes in her retina caused by the dye.

While these cases are “presumably rare,” the report authors say that other doctors should be aware of this condition and willing to consider amine-containing dyes as a possible cause of their patient’s retina issues, especially when initial tests fail to find any other clear answer.