An eye-drop name inside an Illinois health-care group.

Clear Eyes is a brand of eye drops sold in the United States. Its present owner, Prestige, dates it to 1968: a 2004 brand page on the company’s website, preserved by the Internet Archive, opens with the words “since its launch in 1968”. Prestige has owned the brand since 2002, and its current website carries a 2026 copyright line in the name of Prestige Consumer Healthcare Inc.

Before Prestige, the brand belonged to Abbott Laboratories. Archived copies of the Clear Eyes website from 1999 and 2001 show the brand presented by the Ross Products Division, with a copyright line naming Abbott Laboratories of Abbott Park, Illinois, and links back to the Abbott and Ross home pages. Those pages describe three members of the family: Clear Eyes, Clear Eyes ACR and Clear Eyes CLR, the last of them made for contact lens wearers. The suffixes were short letter codes set after the two-word name, so the family read as one brand with three endings.

Ross was itself an acquisition. English Wikipedia’s article on Abbott says that in 1964 the company merged with Ross Laboratories, making Ross a wholly owned subsidiary, and that Richard Ross took a seat on Abbott’s board; it cites the Chicago Tribune of 11 December 1993. The same article says the acquisition brought Similac into the Abbott group, and that Pedialyte and Ensure were later introduced by Ross under Abbott’s ownership.

The division’s name did not last. Wikipedia records, citing The Columbus Dispatch of 8 November 2007, that Abbott retired the Ross Products name that year and renamed the business Abbott Nutrition. By then Clear Eyes had already left the group, and the Ross name survives in the brand’s story mainly through those archived web pages from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

From Abbott to Prestige.

Abbott sold the brand in 2002. English Wikipedia’s Abbott article says that earlier that year the company had sold the Selsun Blue shampoo brand to Chattem, citing a Reuters report in The New York Times of 6 March 2002, and that later in 2002 it sold Clear Eyes and Murine to Prestige Brands; it cites Investor’s Business Daily of 11 January 2018. An archived Clear Eyes web page from October 2003 carries a copyright line in the name of Prestige Brands International. Prestige’s own 2013 history timeline lists Clear Eyes, Murine, Chloraseptic and Comet under the year 2004, when it says the merged company acquired them.

The buyer was a young company. Prestige said on its website in 2005 that Prestige Brands International had been organised in 1999 to acquire brands divested by major consumer products companies, and that it contributed Comet, Chloraseptic, Clear Eyes, Murine and Prell to the combined business. The same page says the investment firm GTCR formed Prestige Brands by merging three companies: Medtech Products, Prestige Brands International and The Spic and Span Company. Prestige Brands International, the page adds, was originally based in Bonita Springs, Florida, and was integrated into Medtech’s locations in Irvington, New York, and Jackson, Wyoming, in 2004. English Wikipedia, citing a MidOcean Partners release, says MidOcean sold Prestige Brands to GTCR in 2004.

The company then went public. Prestige’s 2013 timeline gives February 2005 for its public offering under the trading symbol PBH. The company was later renamed: English Wikipedia gives its former name as Prestige Brands Holdings, used until 2018, when it became Prestige Consumer Healthcare Inc. That same year, according to a company release of 2 July 2018 cited by Wikipedia, Prestige announced the sale of its household cleaning business, which narrowed the group to over-the-counter health care.

Clear Eyes now sits in an eye, ear, nose and throat portfolio. English Wikipedia lists Clear Eyes, Murine, Chloraseptic and Luden’s among Prestige’s brands, and says Prestige added TheraTears and other products in July 2021 when it acquired consumer health assets from Akorn, citing the company’s 2022 annual report. Wikipedia gives Prestige’s headquarters as Tarrytown, New York, and names Ron Lombardi as chief executive and president since 1 June 2015.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on the same few shelves of a pharmacy or supermarket: mouthwash, toothbrushes, toothpaste and eye drops. They belong to a category in which the pack has to carry a great deal in a small space, and in which many of the names have passed through several owners while staying on the shelf under the same word.

Each format sets its own limits. A mouthwash bottle is a tall, see-through container, so the colour of the liquid inside often becomes part of the look, and the label wraps around a curved surface. A toothbrush is usually sold in a blister pack, a clear plastic shell over a printed card, where the brush itself is on show and the card has to hold the name, the head and the range. Eye drops come in a very small bottle inside a folding carton, so the carton front does most of the work, and the type has to stay legible at a few centimetres across.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its packs and advertising have changed — and leaves out anything that cannot be dated.

A descriptive name, letter suffixes and a familiar television face.

The name sits at the centre of the identity. It is made of two ordinary English words rather than a coined one, and it has stayed unchanged through two owners and several company names. The family has been built by adding to it rather than replacing it: the archived Abbott-era pages show three products sharing the words Clear Eyes, two of them marked by short letter suffixes, ACR and CLR. That approach keeps the two-word name in the same position on every product and lets a shopper read the brand before the variant.

Prestige described the brand in its own terms in 2004. Its brand page that year said Clear Eyes had developed “a brand image that stresses premium quality”, a statement of how the company saw the name shortly after it took ownership. In 2007 the company’s website said Prestige had grown by acquiring well-recognised brands from larger consumer products and pharmaceutical companies and giving each one marketing support and line extensions.

Television gave the brand a familiar presenter. English Wikipedia’s article on the actor and writer Ben Stein says he appeared in television advertisements for Clear Eyes eye drops throughout the 1990s and 2000s, alongside advertisements for Godfather’s Pizza in 1987 and Chips Ahoy! in 1990. That run of commercials spans both owners: it began while Clear Eyes was an Abbott brand handled by the Ross Products Division and continued after the 2002 sale to Prestige.

The parent names have changed more often than the brand. The sources trace Clear Eyes from Abbott Laboratories and its Ross Products Division to Prestige Brands International, then to Prestige Brands after the 2004 merger, and to Prestige Consumer Healthcare after the 2018 rename. Through those changes the two-word name, with its short suffixes, has stayed on the bottle, and the brand’s current website, with its 2026 Prestige copyright, still organises the range under that same name.

For a design guide, Clear Eyes shows how a plain, descriptive two-word name can carry a product family through a sale and several corporate renamings, with short suffixes doing the work of telling variants apart. Compare it with Visine, a coined eye-drop name that has moved between three owners, and Comet, another brand that passed through Prestige’s portfolio. For this guide we use lagoon teal and deep petrol on pale aqua with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Clear Eyes’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.