I have been of late crying a lot. Before my leave I was crying 4-5 hours at work. And there didn’t ever seem to be a shortage of tears. My lacrimal glands were perfectly capable of pumping that amount right out. My eyes were getting pretty red and only partly responsive to Visine. I’ve already Googled for answers and checked the Wiki page on tears but no soap. The common answers that were useless Ansers.com and such were along the lines of, "Well, the tears wash away all the lubrication in your eye and thus your eye get irritated. Huh?
Wiki points out that different tears have different make-up but says nothing regarding any change in lubricative effect.
So what’s the Straight Dope? Why should my eyes get red when there being bathed in the very substance that supposed to keep them clear?
Well, in my case I’m not rubbing them. As to burst capillaries that sounds a little unlikely. Enlarged or dilated, sure. Anyway, the state of the symptom, redness, I’ve got. What I was really wondering about is still the cause.
Wiki had some info regarding different compositions of tears. It noted that
basal tears in this case being the normal tears generated by the lacrimal glands. Do any of those look like irritants? Maybe the cause is one of those.
This is just a WAG, but: Increased tears, means increaed blood flow (the water and other stuff in those tears has to come from somewhere), and it’s those enlarged blood vessels causing the red eye (that’s what blushing is, after all).
I also discovered a better explanation of the ‘tears wash the away lubrication’ answer you encountered in your own search. Emotional tears are more salty than the normal tears that lubricate your eyes. A saline solution (i.e. salt water) will draw water from, and release salt to, less salty areas around it (nature tends to seek a balance). This causes the normal film of water over your eyes to becomes more salty than the eyes it’s covering, and that same water-salt exchange happens again with your eyes.