How I almost burned my eye lids off

I once read in a beauty magazine of one glossy sort or another a tip for curling one's eye lashes. I mentally filed the tip away for a future day, but like most information I mentally file away, I forgot one critical element in the recipe. In this recipe, you are to take your standard, run-o-the-mill eye lash curling device (the metal contraption to the right) and heat the "curler" under a hair dryer for a few seconds. The important ingredient I couldn't remember was how long to hold the metal "curler" beneath the blazing hot air of the dryer. I opted for 30 seconds.

I tried one eye, inadvertantly touched the hot metal curler to the thin skin that covers my eye, screamed, then did the same to the other eye. Not only was the entire experiment a failure, the resulting tears of pain mucked up my eye liner.