Sunnie Natural Eye Drops: Attractive Packaging Beats Boring Science
Sunnie Natural Eye Drops are currently ‘sold out’ everywhere. This could be down to a seasonal shortage of homeopathic flower power ingredients. Or, just maybe, it could be the FDA moving fast.
Even if Sunnie is gone forever this blog post is still educational, and hopefully entertaining.
Standard Reasons Why You Should Not Use Sunnie Natural Eye Drops
They are not listed with the Food & Drug Administration, thus:
Being invisible, they were not part of the 2023 FDA smack-down on badly manufactured homeopathic eye drops
Nobody knows who manufactures them
If the FDA can’t find the manufacturing facility, the FDA can’t inspect it
A multi-dose preservative free bottle does not protect you from eye drops that are contaminated during the manufacturing process – the germs are already in the bottle
But wait…you don’t care about the FDA’s opinion, in fact you love that the Agency hates homeopathics. To you, that’s an endorsement. You have a naturopath, a chiropractor, a “wellness doctor who’s a real MD!” The distributor’s braggadocio about earth-friendly packaging means that Sunnie Natural eye drops are manufactured by People Who Really Care About Planetary Wellness. Your kind of people.
Or maybe you are a severe dry eye patient and nothing allopathic has helped. You don’t care about the attractive tubular package or the carbon-neutral crap, you’ll try anything to get some relief.
But should you try Sunnie Natural Dry Eye Drops?
A Stupidly Obvious Reason Why You Should Not Use Sunnie Natural Dry Eye Drops
The magical homeopathic ingredient is “Belladonna 4x.” This is described as treating “severe dryness.”
The 3 active ingredients derived from belladonna are known collectively as belladonna alkaloids: atropine, hycosamine and scopolamine*. They affect the body through the anti-cholinergic mechanism, meaning they block the effects of acetylcholine (produced by the body) on various tissues.
All anticholinergic drugs (whether eye drops or oral medications) dilate the pupils and decrease the eye’s up close focusing ability.
All anticholinergic drugs (whether eye drops or oral medications) DECREASE TEAR PRODUCTION.
Belladonna won’t make your dry eyes better, it will make them worse.
Your best hope is that there isn’t any actual belladonna in that Sunnie bottle. “Belladonna 4x” means diluted 4 times, but what was diluted 4 times? Why do you say you don’t care? You should care.
Deadly nightshade and belladonna are two names for the same plant. The person in charge of dilution had better be on their game.
*Many people who use a scopolamine patch for motion sickness experience pupil dilation, blurred near vision and dry eyes / dry mouth to some extent.
PS If you use Sunnie Dry Eye Drops and believe they help, go buy yourself a legitimate product that contains hyaluronic acid (find it under Inactive Ingredients). Although relegated to third place on Sunnie’s ingredient list, this is the effective ingredient.
One of Us Has To Be Wrong: DrB or Sunnie Natural
I’m right and I can explain.
The plant name Atropa belladonna translates as “beautiful lady.”
Victorian ladies of leisure used belladonna drops to dilate their pupils, which was aesthetically desirable at the time. Watery eyes were also desirable. To get the watering, ladies would put strong irritants like citrus or perfume in their eyes.
The shrewd druggist of the era could ensure that his belladonna eye drops were 2-for-1: dreamy big pupils, and tragic watering eyes. Just make a tincture of belladonna by soaking plant parts in alcohol or vinegar, filter, dilute but not too much*, bottle and voila! Unknown but useful consequence: the alcohol or vinegar probably acted as a preservative.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia, which got it right vis a vis the pupil dilation.
The point here is that that the belladonna wasn’t causing the watering, but since belladonna tincture caused watering it was easy to assume watering was also due to the belladonna.
This is possibly the first reported case of an eye drop having an inactive ingredient that was actually active.
*Evidently it was known that if you used belladonna tincture eye drops excessively you could go blind. Excepting the rare case of acute angle closure glaucoma, the anti-cholinergic ingredients derived from belladonna won’t cause blindness from repeat exposure, although other unknown chemicals in the tincture might. I suspect that eventually severe corneal toxicity developed from repeated exposure to alcohol or vinegar.
These People Are Too Stupid to Trust With Your Eyes
You can’t blame the druggist who bottled the tincture and advertised it in the ladies’ home journal, he was selling “big pupils + watering eyes = marriage” and he delivered.
The homeopathy industry went off the rails somewhere and started adding belladonna to their multitudinous dry eye drops. It makes me laugh to speculate that this all started with total ignorance of plant chemistry (belladonna alkaloids = anticholinergic), combined with the industry’s extreme prejudice against any knowledge used in allopathic medicine (anticholinergic = decreased tear production), combined with misinterpretation of some Victorian druggist’s funky old recipe book.
What About Sunnie Redness and Sunnie Digital Eye Strain
Sunnie Digital contains 2 legitimate lubricants: hypromellose and propylene glycol. I’m howling about the Ruta graveolens 4x, which treats “strained ligaments.”
The focusing muscle of the eye, called the ciliary body, does not have ligaments. Since the homeopathy industry refuses to believe in allopathic medicine, including important bits of it like the anatomy of the eye, this just doesn’t matter to them.
To further scratch that natural itch, the manufacturer appears to be adjusting the pH of Sunnie Digital with citric acid instead of hydrochloric acid, or just throwing it in as a USDA-recommended fruit serving. Citric acid is commercially manufactured by the ton, not squeezed out of organic lemons. It’s not any nicer or nastier than hydrochloric acid, which is what sane eye drop manufacturers use.
On to Sunnie Redness. See above: 2 legitimate lubricants, citric acid. Add in some vitamin B6 (also commercially manufactured in bulk, not manually extracted from anything previously alive). Add in some…Hepar sulphuris calcareum 10x. I love these old Latin names. Hepar means liver. Thus Hepar sulphuris calcareum is “calcium sulfide the color of liver.” The problem with Hepar is that modern (pure) calcium sulfide in powder form is white. Back in the day, what with a huge amount of impurities and all, maybe calcium sulfide was the color of liver. Maybe those impurities were really doing the job, and they’re gone now.
Howler again: Hepar sulphuris calcareum is made using flowers of sulphur. Flowers = homeopathic, right? Actually, flowers of sulfur is produced commercially by Big Chemical and ‘flowers’ refers to the extremely fine consistency of the sulfur powder. A few common uses include rubber vulcanization, cattle feed, and crop dusting.
Damn, I promised Rebecca this blog post would be shorter but my inner Mad Scientist (BS Chemistry 1986, UC Berkeley) keeps seizing control.
Enough With the Chemistry, Back To the Rant
The Sunnie Natural Eye Drops distributor (fancy web page, cute packaging) and the manufacturer (parts unknown) and the sub-distributors (you know who you are) are violating big chunks of the Federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act. It is wise to keep space between law-breaking companies and your corneas.
Sunnie Natural claims that its eye drops are “crafted with 100% plant based ingredients.” If this were actually true, each bottle would cost insanely more than it does cost ($22), because most of the ingredients (other than the flower power stuff) are manufactured by the ton, super cheaply, from non-plant based raw ingredients. Getting every ingredient from plants – which is what 100% means – is impossible.
Sunnie Natural also claims that its products are “approved by medical experts.” They have one optometrist smiling on their web site. Dr. X proudly tells us that she is the clinical director of operations at Dr. Y’s Lasik & Eye Center in Las Vegas…which permanently closed in June 2023 after Dr. Y* ran afoul of the Nevada Board of Medicine. Dr. X is also a surgery center ‘member’ of Stonecreek Surgery Center. As an OD (not a DO), she can’t perform the surgeries that are performed at Stonecreek Surgery Center. So it’s not surprising that her name is not on the surgeon drop-down menu. The Nevada State Board of Optometry has previously frowned on her LASIK advertising, which confused even her fellow optometrists as to whether she is or is not performing LASIK surgery herself.**
*Thought: Directing clinical operations for a guy who ignored a Medical Board order and got his license suspended and had to shut down his practice is not a good look. Maybe you should drop this from your bio?
** See Agenda Item 2A. https://nvoptometry.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/April-Meeting-Agenda-and-Materials.pdf
Solum Versus Est
Sunnie Natural is hiding from the FDA and deceiving consumers.
Beer is crafted, eye drops are manufactured.
Medical experts often aren’t.
OTC eye drops are ophthalmic drugs, not a lifestyle experience.
Buy eye drops manufactured by Real Pharma. In real stores.
DrB
