State health officials focus on unlicensed sale of Halloween costume contact lenses

TAMPA - Florida's Department of Health is warning people about a Halloween costume accessory it says could be dangerous.  The office is cracking down on twelve stores across the state because of them.
    
You see them on sale for Halloween, decorative contact lenses used to enhance costumes. But state health officials say buying them from businesses without a license can be harmful to your eyes.
    
The department ordered eight stores to stop selling them and issued fines of hundreds of dollars in some cases. People's Beauty, DJ Beauty, and Beauty and Beyond are three of five Bay area businesses cited in the crackdown. None of those stores wanted to comment for this story.

But experts say looking good in your costume just isn't worth it.

Doctor Adam Scheiner says there are two problems when it comes to buying from a retailer with no license. First, the contacts may not fit, which could injure your eye. Dr. Scheiner said, "If it sticks too tight to the eye, once again, it deprives the surface of oxygen. Lowers the oxygen level. Bacterial elements can invade and cause infections."

Buying the wrong material could also cause problems. Dr. Scheiner said, "There's certain material that breathes better than other materials and if you don't have that material that breathes very well and you're putting this on the eye, the same thing happens."

Those troubles, he says, could lead to life-long consequences. Dr. Scheiner said, "You could have an infection of the eye. The infection could be treated and leave you with a scar and the worst thing could be an infection of the eye that takes over the eye and it would be unusually rare, but you could possibly lose your entire eye if an infection took hold of the entire eyeball."