After enduring a challenging time that saw her battle with renal and kidney failure, 50-year-old Shirley Potter was delighted to be asked out on a night out with her daughters. It was a big break for her to finally enjoy some time with her children.

Little did she know that her ecstasy was about to turn into sour moments. The events of that night made the coming years very excruciating for Ms. Potter. She has had to deal with agonizing eye pain. She has since then been declared legally blind and is very likely to lose her vision for good in three years.

The mother of three has linked her harrowing situation and the unanticipated cause of her agony to an out of date eye makeup. ‘It was the first time my daughters had invited me out, so naturally, I was over the moon.

Shirley and her daughters had a very good time enjoying a few glasses of wine in each other’s company that night. ‘I bought a new outfit, took a trip to the hairdressers and decided to put on makeup for the first time in years,’ she said.

She was not too stunned when her husband commented on how red her eyes looked since she had a defect on her left eye. ‘I was born with a defect in my left eye, which meant I never had sight or feeling in it whatsoever.’ But when she began to feel excruciating pain in both eyes the morning after their night on the town, even then she knew that something was terribly wrong.

But when she went to her ophthalmologist, he couldn’t seem to find anything wrong with her eyes. But she knew that her sight was getting worse. ‘Even though I was told they checked out fine, I could feel my sight deteriorating.‘

‘Months of pain went by, until one day I fell over a baby’s pram in our local shopping center. I genuinely couldn’t see it, and my husband said we need to go back for more tests,’ she said.

It was then that her ophthalmologist saw what was wrong and diagnosed her with a serious infection in both eyes.

‘He asked me directly if I’d been using old or out of date makeup. I told him I’d used makeup on our family night out which had been in the press for some time,’ she said, adding the makeup was around twenty years old.

Concerned, then specialist asked if she was aware of use by dates on cosmetic products.

‘I had never heard that makeup must be used within a certain period of opening the product, but after my consultation, I went online and discovered you should throw out facial products after twelve months and eye makeup after six months. As someone who doesn’t wear makeup regularly, it wasn’t on my radar,’ she said.

Her doctor prescribed some antibiotics for her but it couldn’t remediate her sight. The damage had already been done.

‘Specialists advise me I will lose my eyesight completely within the next three years which is such a frightening prospect,’ she said.

For her, it’s more than losing her sight, it’s losing her independence. Ms Potter is about to lose her driving license.

She has become extremely sensitive to light even at night, traffic lights and car headlamps produce beams of light that cause a lot of pain. She has spent the past three weeks in a darkened room.

Ms. Potter warns women to be careful about checking the use by dates on makeup.