A man suffered a severe allergic reaction to hair dye, which caused him to develop a “balloon head.”
Videos by Suggest
Ryan Briggs, 27, from Blackburn, Lancashire, experienced a wild allergic reaction to black hair dye. Originally, he noticed a burning sensation after applying the dye. Not thinking much of it, he went to sleep.
“I applied the dye and it did burn a little bit but I thought that’s what it does,” Briggs said. “Obviously it wasn’t.”
The next morning, Briggs noticed some minor skin irritation and a rash on the top of his head. He went to work as normal, but within hours, his head began to blow up like a balloon. At this point, his coworkers encouraged him to go home and seek medical treatment.
“It wasn’t that bad [at first] but throughout the day my head started expanding,” he said. “My colleagues said, ‘You need to get to the hospital.'”
At the hospital, doctors sent him home and told him to come back if it got worse — which it did.
“I went home and my girlfriend was gobsmacked, she couldn’t look at me because I didn’t look like me, I had this big balloon head,” he explained.
Man Suffers Allergic Reaction to Hair Dye, Left With Giant ‘Balloon Head’
The swelling spread to his face and eyes, which were almost swollen shut. He was then taken back to the hospital by ambulance. This time, he spent 13 hours at the hospital, with doctors monitoring his ability to breathe in case the swelling reached his neck.
“I didn’t look like myself at all. It was horrible. It was massive. I looked like Megamind,” Briggs said.
As it turns out, Briggs had been experiencing a reaction to paraphenylenediamine, a common chemical in hair dyes. Once he was released from the hospital, he was instructed to take a series of 25mg daily tablets to keep the swelling under control.
While he’s doing much better now, he still has scabs on his scalp from the severe rash.
“My scalp is full of yellow and green scabs but my face has gone back to normal now,” he said. “I should have done a patch test really but I didn’t know that you had to do that.”
“Always do a patch test,” he encouraged others. “It could have been worse, it was going down into my neck and everything.”