Photoshop can easily be a friend but just as quickly it can be an enemy. In this case as stated above it has been your enemy. You had the right idea about the edits, but took them a bit too far.
What you shound consider doing is feather select the background and blur it out a tiny bit. That'll help those stray ends also blur the background a bit as well.
Creat a second layer for her eyes only. Select them only sharpen them a tad bit, not too much because it may become grainy.
If you want to work on exposure you'll need the file in raw format, you can't really do an "exposure" edit on a jpg. You can change brightness of areas using things like adjustment layers.
I am a fan of the picture, not of the edit. Lets see the original, if you want I'm sure some of the people here can take a try at editing it and see what they can do.
