Focus Aesthetics is inside both clinics
Common questions
Short answer
Watering eyes are usually a symptom of dry eye, not the opposite of it. When the tear film breaks down, the surface of the eye becomes irritated and responds by flooding itself with a rush of watery tears — which run down your cheek rather than coating the eye properly. Treating the underlying dryness is usually what stops the watering.
A healthy tear film has three parts: a watery layer for volume, a mucus layer that helps it stick to the eye, and a thin layer of oil on top that stops the whole thing evaporating. The oil comes from the meibomian glands along your lid margins.
When those glands are blocked, the oil layer thins and the watery layer evaporates too quickly. The exposed surface becomes irritated, and the eye does the only thing it can: it produces a flood of emergency tears. Those reflex tears are almost all water, with little of the oil that would help them stay where they are needed. So they spill over the lid instead of doing the job.
It is the reason watering and dryness — which sound like opposites — so often turn up in the same pair of eyes.
Reflex tearing usually gets worse in wind and cold, which is why an Edmonton winter is when most people finally book an appointment. It is also common after a long stretch on a screen: we blink around 60% less while looking at one, and each incomplete blink leaves the oil glands a little less expressed.
Watering that is worse outdoors, worse in winter, and accompanied by burning or grittiness points towards evaporative dry eye.
Not all watering is dry eye. Tears drain through a small opening at the inner corner of each lid into the nose, and if that drainage is narrowed or blocked, tears have nowhere to go. Allergy causes watering too, though it usually brings itch with it. So can a lash growing inwards, or a lid that no longer sits flush against the eye.
These need looking at rather than guessing between, which is the honest reason to have an assessment before buying anything.
Where treatment starts
Visit one of our experienced optometrists to get started on your journey to true dry eye relief. The exam is what separates blocked oil glands from allergy, from lid margin inflammation, from everything else that produces the same symptoms — and it is what tells us whether the treatments we offer will help you.
Related questions
Whether any of this applies to your eyes specifically is a question an assessment answers in one appointment.