March 12 (UPI) — Doctors with a Colorado hospital system are urging eye drop users to read labels carefully after noting an uptick in cases of people accidentally putting glue into their eyes.
Dr. Richard Davidson, an ophthalmologist with UCHealth, which is headquartered in Aurora, said medical practitioners have noticed it has become surprisingly common for people to mistake nail glue or lash glue for eye drops.
“There might be a couple of months where we don’t see anyone, and then all of a sudden, we may get two or three people with this type of situation,” he told KUSA-TV. “There’s a variety of ways we see it happen, but it is relatively common.”
He said nail and lash glues, as well as several other products, can sometimes come in bottles that closely resemble eye drop containers.
“It’s amazing how many products look similar, and we can end up putting them in the eye by accident,” Davidson said. “Sometimes it’s eye makeup glue, sometimes it’s ear drops that are supposed to go in the ear and they go in the eye.”
One such case went viral in 2024, when TikTok user @breezybre416 shared her experience with accidentally putting nail glue into her eye.
“This glue dries in a matter of seconds,” Davidson said. “We really encourage you, if you can get to a sink, try and wash it out or take a towel and loosen it up a little bit because the quicker you act, the better.”
Davidson said doctors sometimes have to scrape adhesive from the surface of a patient’s eye, but the incidents generally don’t lead to any permanent damage.
“It’s rare to cause permanent damage, but it can be very uncomfortable for the first couple of days,” he said.
Davidson and his colleagues urged eye drop users to make sure they carefully read labels before applying eye drops, and keep their drops somewhere separate from any similarly sized or colored bottles.
