People Keep Squirting Glue Into Their Eyes Thinking Its Eye Drops

Folks, please use your eyes to read the labels on the little bottles of liquid that you’re going to squeeze into your eyes.

This may sound like common sense to some of you, but apparently, there’s a growing number of people in the United States who are reaching for a little bottle of eyedrops and are instead squeezing nail or eyelash glue into their eyes.

You may remember a woman in late 2024 who accidentally squirted nail glue into her eyes. If you don’t, here’s the TikTok video she posted describing the incident. I will warn you that it is disturbing. I only made it through the first four seconds of the video before my brain pieced together the horror I was looking at and I recoiled in visceral disgust.

A Lot of People Are Accidentally Squirting Glue In Their Eyes

Her experience is way more common than you might think, according to ophthalmologist Dr. Richard Davidson from the University of Colorado Health System. Even weirder, he says that not only are people doing this much more often than you think, but for some reason it happens in waves.

“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.”

Thankfully, Doctor Davidson says that these mistakes don’t usually damage the eye permanently, but they do need immediate medical attention.

Nail and eyelash glue is essentially a quick-drying super glue. It only takes a minute or two for the glue to harden, so if you squeeze in some eyedrops that turn out to be super glue, Dr. Davidson recommends immediately rushing to the nearest faucet to start flushing out your eye.

He also says that even if you do manage to get most of it out, either yourself or at the hospital, you’re still going to be in for at least a few days of miserable pain.

If it happens to you, don’t feel too bad about it. Well, you’re going to feel physically bad about it. There’s not much that can be done about that. But emotionally and psychologically, don’t beat yourself up over it.

Like Dr. Davidson said, “It’s amazing how many products look similar, and we can end up putting them in the eye by accident.” Maybe one day the heads of the eyedrop industry will take a lunch with the big wigs over at the tiny glue bottle industry to hash out this issue and settle on more visually distinct packaging for both products.

But until then, make sure you read the label before you just start scorning something in your eye all willy-nilly.