Aside from potentially polluting the Great Lakes, controversial microbeads (you know, those tiny plastic beads found in face and body scrubs) may cause serious damage to your face.
According to one Redditor, as he sloughed his face with a microbead-based exfoliator, one of the tiny beads became lodged in an enlarged pore on his cheek — where it stayed until he had to physically remove it. (Uh, yikes!)
"Well one of those blue (plastic?) microbeads are stuck in a pore right on the surface of my skin. It's on my high cheek where I've never experienced any open acne so I'm not sure how it got in there," Casual_Mongolian wrote in the SkincareAddiction subreddit forum. "Regardless, it's not infected or anything right now and I'm not in any pain. I tried to poke it out with a sterilized needle, but it's such a tight squeeze I didn't want to rip up my skin trying to get behind it."
Luckily, the good people of Reddit chimed in with sound advice and words of wisdom, including — but not limited to — removing it with a comedone extractor, piercing it with a sterilized pin, and plucking it with tweezers, to help Casual_Mongolian dislodge the bead on his own.
The winning solution? Opening up the pore with a heated towel and using two Q-tips to gently squeeze out the bead. Following the procedure, Casual_Mongolian even shared a photo of the bead in question with fellow Redditors as proof.
If there's a lesson to be learned from all of this, it's that, maybe, just maybe, scrubbing down with microbead-based formulas might not be as skin-safe as we all originally assumed. Luckily, we've previously rounded up microbead-free scrubs we trust to slough off dead skin cells instead.
See some truly brilliant beauty tips from Reddit:
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