EDS Awareness

May is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) Awareness month, and I wanted to help raise awareness (with super kudos to my friend Fay who has EDS and posted on her facebook about it being the awareness month – in my work-mountain-induced ignorance I had no idea!).

So, what is EDS? To quote the NHS Choices website:

 Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) is a collection of inherited conditions that fit into a larger group, known as heritable disorders of connective tissue. Connective tissues provide support in skin, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, internal organs and bones.

There are different types of EDS that may share some features, including:

• joint hypermobility – increased range of movement of joints
• stretchy skin
• fragile skin tissue

 People with EDS typically have loose joints, which means the limbs bend more than usual. This can cause floppy joints in infancy, and some affected children take longer to sit, stand and walk.

 The four most common types of EDS include:

• hypermobile EDS
• classical EDS
• vascular EDS
• kyphoscoliotic EDS

There are also other, rarer, types of EDS, including dermatosparaxis and arthrochalasic.

You can find more information at the NHS Choices site here or at EDS Support UK here and I do recommend reading as it’s a complex family of disorders and going into all of the different kinds would result in my writing an essay on a topic I’m not really qualified to talk about.

The awareness symbol for EDS is zebra stripes as the term zebra is often used in medical professions to reference rare diseases and conditions (“When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras”). Generally this is good advice, but sometimes doctors forget that zebras do exist, and EDS is one of those “zebra” conditions. Hence the zebra stripes, which is really clever if you think about it! So in true beauty junkie fashion, I’ve done some makeup for EDS.

Used: Aromaleigh Crisp over the lid, Black Rose Minerals Jet for the stripes and my brows and the liner is Victorian Disco Halloween Town

I hope this maybe raised a little awareness for a rare and not often talked about condition, and if you have a few spare pennies lest and wish to donate to EDS then Ehlers-Danlos Support UK has a donations page