Horrific hair dye reaction leaves woman looking like ’emoji’

She “dyed” and came back as an emoticon.

A Texas woman said she was left looking like an “emoji” after a horrific hair dye reaction caused her face to balloon up to cartoonish proportions.

“I was laughing at myself because I did look extremely funny,” Shanika McNeil, 29, told Kennedy News of the cosmetic catastrophe, which occurred after she got her mane colored in January.

While the procedure initially went off without a hitch, pretty soon she noticed something was terribly awry.

“I dyed my hair myself on Sunday evening and it was fine, I had no issues,” the Houston native described. “Then in the morning I woke up and I had a headache — it lasted all day and then probably around 3 p.m. I noticed I had this line around my forehead and a rash.”

All of a sudden, McNeil was beset by multiple symptoms simultaneously. “My scalp started burning like it was on fire and then I used a napkin and could tell my scalp was oozing,” she described, adding that “as the hours went by I noticed my forehead was getting puffier.”

Alarmed at the sudden onset, the petrified gal reported to the doctor, who informed her that she’d suffered an allergic reaction to an ingredient in the dye called PPD, Kennedy reported.

According to Healthline, symptoms of this condition can range from mild itching and swelling to anaphylactic shock and even death.

The medic subsequently prescribed McNeil antihistamines and steroids to help combat the swelling, which alleviated her pain, leading her to believe she’d nipped the problem in the bud.

Little did she know, her symptoms would rear their ugly head once again after she returned home.

“Every hour I looked at myself and my forehead was getting bigger and the swelling was worse,” McNeil recalled of her unfortunate case of “hyperinflation.” “It looked like I was an emoji, it was very weird. My whole family was panicking because I looked so strange. A lot of people said I looked like I was in a fight.”

Accompanying pics show the hair-dye buff’s voluminous visage, which evokes a live-action version of the emoticon for apathy.

McNeil initially thought her cartoonish countenance was funny. However, she quickly realized it was no laughing matter after “the pain kicked in” and her “eyes were completely swollen shut so I couldn’t see for a few days.”

Despite administering herself anti-histamines, her symptoms continued to snowball.

“The swelling moved from my forehead to the middle of my face so my eyes were completely swollen and burning,” described the terrified Texan. “I tried to ice them and they would go down a little bit but then they would get bigger every time. I had bruises under my eyes because the swelling was so bad.”

McNeil’s family started to worry about her reaction, so she called her doctor for advice. The medic advised the hair-coloration casualty to report to the hospital because “the swelling could move down to my throat and I could die,” she said.

When she arrived at the hospital, medics were reportedly shocked at her puffy appearance. They prescribed her more steroids and antihistamines, whereupon at long last, McNeil’s emoji-esque swelling began to subside.

“I was probably there about three or four hours before the swelling stopped and then they let me go,” described McNeil. “It was so swollen that it just took some time to go down.”

Unfortunately, the reaction had residual effects, including relegating the poor gal to using “baby shampoo for weeks” to avoid triggering another reaction.

In addition, McNeil claims that the ordeal left her with bald spots, eczema and a scalp so sensitive that it hurts to comb her hair.

McNeil believes she missed the warning signs of her dye allergy as she’d suffered scalp sensitivity over the past year. She also didn’t link the two as her symptoms would occur a full week after each mane-coloring session.

The experience has left the amateur hairstylist afraid of using hair dye altogether. “I haven’t dyed my hair since and I don’t have any intentions of doing it,” said McNeil, who is using her face-puffing plight to as a cautionary tale to prevent others from suffering the same fate.

“A lot of people in the comments said the same thing happened to them — they’d been using a dye for years and then had a reaction,” she said. “I’ve told people to do a patch test every time they use it [dye] and if you are sensitive to it, look for a dye that doesn’t have PPD in it.”

McNeil isn’t the first to experience a hellacious reaction to hair dye. In 2019, a UK woman was temporarily blinded after PPD side effects caused her face to triple in size.