I'm An Eye Doctor. Here's The 1 Product I'd Never Use On My Eyes.

Eye health is often overlooked. Tons of Americans skip their annual eye exams: Of those who are considered to be at high risk for vision loss, which is roughly 4 in 10 Americans, 40% didn’t get their eyes checked out in the past year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .

“It’s not until you have [a] problem with your eyes that you really become grateful for your vision,” said Dr. Michelle Holmes, an optometrist at Pacific Neuroscience Institute in Santa Monica, California.

There’s a lot you can do to protect your eye health . You can keep up with your annual eye exams, wear sunglasses to shield your eyes from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays, and avoid wearing contacts to bed or in the pool, to name a few.

But is there one habit you should never do, even though it may seem like eye care: Don’t use eye-whitening, or red-eye relieving, drops.

“My concern with those types of eye drops is that eye-whitening drops can be used by someone to mask redness, and, oftentimes, that redness is a symptom of some more serious underlying condition,” Holmes told HuffPost.

Here’s why you may want to steer clear of redness relief eye drops.

When your eye is irritated, as it may be with pink eye or certain allergies, the blood vessels located in the front of the eye will dilate and engorge. “That’s what causes the white part of the eye to look red and angry,” Holmes explained.

Those blood vessels serve an important purpose — when inflamed, they indicate something is wrong, Holmes said. This could be due to a mild problem, such as a cold or dust in the eye, or it may be a symptom of a more serious health condition like an infection, glaucoma or a corneal abrasion.

“It’s not normal to have a red,