Eye Safety

Eye Safety at Holi and Diwali

Two of the year's biggest celebrations are also the two biggest spikes in eye injuries at Indian hospitals. Almost all of it is preventable, and none of it requires skipping the festival.

🕔 8 min read🎆 Festivals👁 Eye safety

Why these two festivals in particular

Eye hospitals across India report sharp increases in admissions around both Holi and Diwali, and the injury patterns are quite different from each other.

Holi injuries are chemical and abrasive. Synthetic colours can contain industrial dyes, metal oxides and glass or mica particles used to create shine. These cause chemical irritation and physical scratching of the cornea, and water balloons thrown with force cause blunt trauma.

Diwali injuries are thermal and explosive. Firecrackers produce burns, high-velocity fragments and chemical exposure from the compounds inside them. A significant share of those injured are bystanders rather than the person lighting the cracker, and children are heavily over-represented.

Holi: before you step out

Wear eye protection. Wraparound sunglasses or protective eyewear provide a physical barrier against both colour and water balloons. Wrap-around styles work far better than flat frames here because they close the gap at the sides where colour usually enters.

Skip contact lenses entirely for the day. Colour trapped between a lens and the cornea sits against the eye surface and cannot be flushed out easily. Wear spectacles instead, or protective eyewear over them.

Apply a layer of oil or moisturiser around the eye area. It creates a barrier that makes colour easier to rinse away and reduces how much sits on the skin.

Choose natural colours where you can influence it. Herbal and food-grade colours cause substantially fewer chemical injuries than synthetic powders with metallic shine.

Keep your eyes closed during application. Most colour reaches the eye during the moment of being coloured, not afterwards.

Holi: if colour gets in your eye

Do not rub. This is the single most important instruction and the hardest to follow. Rubbing grinds abrasive particles across the cornea and turns irritation into a scratch.

Flush with clean water immediately and generously. Cool running water for fifteen to twenty minutes, holding the lid open, letting water run from the inner corner outward so you are not washing material into the other eye.

Do not use eye drops from the cabinet. Redness-reducing drops constrict blood vessels and mask symptoms without treating anything. Milk, rose water and traditional preparations are not sterile and can introduce infection to an already compromised surface.

Seek medical attention if there is persistent pain, redness that does not settle, blurred vision, light sensitivity or a sensation that something is still in the eye. A corneal abrasion needs proper treatment to avoid infection.

Diwali: firecracker precautions

Maintain distance. A large share of firecracker eye injuries happen to bystanders standing closer than they realise, and rockets and aerial crackers behave unpredictably.

Never return to a cracker that has not gone off. Delayed ignition is a common cause of facial and eye injury, and the safe response is to douse it with water from a distance after waiting.

Supervise children directly rather than nominally. Children are heavily over-represented in festival eye injuries and are the least able to judge safe distance.

Keep a bucket of water and clean water for irrigation ready before starting, not after something happens. In an emergency the first minute matters most and searching for water wastes it.

Wear protective eyewear if you are lighting anything. Ordinary spectacles offer partial protection against fragments, which is better than nothing, though they are not impact-rated.

Diwali: if an injury happens

For a burn or an impact injury, do not rub the eye, do not attempt to remove anything embedded in it, and do not apply ointment, oil or any home preparation.

Cover the eye lightly with a clean cloth or a paper cup taped over the socket. The purpose is protection from pressure, not compression. Do not press.

Go to hospital immediately. Firecracker injuries frequently involve retained fragments and chemical exposure that are not visible from outside, and the window in which vision can be preserved is narrow.

For chemical exposure without penetrating injury, irrigate with clean water on the way while heading to hospital. Time spent flushing is time well spent for chemical exposure specifically.

Myths that cause harm

Rose water, milk or breast milk in an injured eye. None are sterile and all risk introducing infection into a compromised eye surface. Clean water is the correct irrigant.

Rubbing to get the particle out. Rubbing is what converts a foreign body into a corneal abrasion.

Waiting overnight to see if it settles. For chemical and penetrating injuries, delay directly affects outcome.

Using leftover prescription eye drops. Steroid drops in particular can worsen an undiagnosed infection or abrasion considerably.

Assuming a lack of pain means a lack of injury. Corneal nerve damage and some penetrating injuries can be relatively painless initially.

Frequently asked questions