Allergies make you miserable — and unattractive, too

The wheezing, the sneezing, the dripping, the coughs â€" ask anyone who suffers from seasonal allergies (
including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ) and they’ll tell you, it’s not pretty.

Allergy season is especially bad this year,

experts recently confirmed

: It's lasting longer, and sudden shifts in weather patterns have made releases of tree pollen more potent. But with proper treatment, doctors say you can look and feel more like yourself â€" unlike recent mornings for Andrea Lynn.
“I’ll sometimes wake up with hives on my eyelids, says Lynn, a 33-year-old food writer from Astoria, N.Y. Sometimes, I feel like my whole face is puffy but I don’t know if that’s just in my head. My eyes definitely get bad  they swell up and get a reddish purple color. Someone once asked if somebody had hit me. I told them No, its just allergies.
These so-called “allergic shiners� are nothing new to Dr. Clifford Bassett, medical director of Allergy and Asthma Care of New York and clinical assistant professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine.
“With seasonal allergies, you develop sagging of the eyelids and puffiness of the eyelids and the facial structure below the eyelid,� he says. “It looks like someone popped you in the eye.'You need to get off the drugs'
Amazingly, a bad case of the allergy uglies can even impact a person’s job prospects, he says.
“I saw one woman who went on multiple job interviews but couldn’t get a job,� he says. “She finally went back to her last interviewer and asked why she wasn’t hired and he told her ‘You need to get off the drugs.’ People with allergies have watery eyes, puffiness, runny noses and the HR departments in corporate America think they

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