@Fallingtears: Does your bottom lip curl or bulge when you are sobbing?

@Fallingtears: do you allow your tears to fall unchecked? how intense are your tears when you cry?

I've noticed that when my wife cries if she allows the tears to flow without wiping her eyes or face it takes longer for her eyes to go red. Found this to be true of my own crying as well.
I think it also depends on the intensity of the crying - if you are in floods of tears eyes will become red pretty quickly. Again using my wife as an example - when she is crying at a film her tears don't tend to be all that intense - sure tears fall down her cheeks but they are not falling one after the other. When she is crying like this she tends not to get the bottom lip curl thing - which is a rare occurance for her (sorry TorNorth) - but it does give her the movie cry look which I like. If she is very upset and crying hard then the bottom lip (along with her shoulders) will start to tremble - the tear volume is also greatly increased which will cause her eyes to go red. Her eye lashes tend to stick together in clumps which is kind of nice.

I don't have any scientific fact on this other than general observation but I tend to find women with brown eyes appear to get red eyes quicker than women with blue or green eyes (unless they are very pale in colour). My wife has blue eyes which go a kind of smokey blue when she is crying - like all the colours and shades mix together - yum!

To help prove of disprove this theory what colour are your eyes?

TorNorth wrote:

Thanks tearhunter. I've been meaning to ask about your wife's lip movements, but I never did out of embarrassment lol.

No worries TorNorth, my wife is not a big lip curling person when she cries. She is definitely more of a tears girl !

Her voice does wobble almost everytime she cries so if she is trying to talk this will result in a bit of a change in mouth shape but not much of a trembling lip (tears fall but ranges from a single tear to perhaps 2-3 per minute).
As her crying intensity increases she will quietly sob - more like breathing in gasps. Shoulders might start to shake a bit. She generally can't speak at this point so not much lip trembling still (tears increase in volume and size)

In the 15 years I've known my wife I've only seen her lose it completely 3 or 4 times.

On at least one of these occasions her bottom lip did tremble along with loud sobbing (full face thing) - her shoulders where heaving up and down and tears where falling down her face in a constaint stream dripping off her nose and chin. This level of crying is obviously very painful and upsetting to see because it needs to be (and was) a major event. During this event I was crying almost as hard - definitely red eyes all round that day!

Fallingtears wrote:

My eyes are blue btw

Well that's debunked that theory then!   

Does make me wonder are some people just more prone to red eyes than others - as you say the intensity and duration are definitely a factor, but my wife can cry for 10 minutes solid before her eyes start to get a bit red.
I fact did say intially her eyes actually look clearer, sparkling as if they have been cleaned !

Do you allow your tears to fall unchecked in front of other people? I can imagine this might differ for people close to you as opposed to friends, work colleagues etc.

This I find is one of the main differences between male and female crying - women allow tears to fall and be visible to others when they cry - generally if a guy cries the tears are wiped away immediately unless it is in front of a significant other!

Sometimes I think women are embarrased about the reason they are crying not the crying itself, whereas men are embarrased about the physical signs of crying and not the reason so much - a general observation I know.

tearhunter wrote:

Fallingtears wrote:

My eyes are blue btw

Well that's debunked that theory then!   

Does make me wonder are some people just more prone to red eyes than others - as you say the intensity and duration are definitely a factor, but my wife can cry for 10 minutes solid before her eyes start to get a bit red.
I fact did say intially her eyes actually look clearer, sparkling as if they have been cleaned !

This has a lot to do about the level of salanity in the tears but also about the general crying frequencies and probably some other factors...

I can always observe this when I don't shed tears for a very long time (more then >6 month), the eyes but also the face tend to get really red and swell like hell after the first 2-3 tears fall, while this effect decrease when the crying 's happening more often...

Another thing I could observe which is perhaps interesting:   

drinking more water =  more tears!       
drinking extremely much water =  flood of tears! (and also less eye redness again)

don't exactly know why but I have tried it and it works!

drinking 4 liters of water / day + eating few salt + crying all the time =  high tears rate and no eyes redness or puffiness, even after a X- hour hardcore cry spell...
drinking 1 liter of water / day + eating much salt + crying rarely =  more tearless crying (teardrops very salty) + red face/eyes...