The widespread use of colours in recent decades, especially the legitimate synthetic Azo dye Sunset Yellow (SY) as an additive to foods, beverages, drugs and cosmetics making them difficult to be indispensable to the modern day consumer. The current study is trying to find a safe alternative crucial colourant (from the aspects of morphological, behavioural, cytotoxicity and genotoxicity influences), by using a natural additive curcumin (CU). The study allocated thirty adult male mice into three groups, assigning as control ones, SY- and CU-groups. The other two groups were fed orally with equivalent (Acceptable Daily Intake) ADI dosage of 30 or 37 mg of SY or CU /kg b.wt./ daily for 30 days, respectively. The results exhibited distinct signs of anorexia and markedly statistical significant decrease (p<0.05) in the percentage of body weights of mice together with hair loss, ulcerated or skin rashes post-SY gavage. The ultrastructural observations induced-SY group involved relatively drastic effects in the hepatocytes as manifested by fragmentation of the rough endoplasmic reticulum, lipid droplets and vacuolated mitochondria. Moreover, the SY- group was recorded two main types of chromosomal aberrations, namely: structural (such as deletions/and or fragments, and ring chromosomes) and numerical ones (mainly represented by polyploidy) in a significantly increase (p<0.05), when encountered with control- and CU-animals. The frequency of Mitotic Index (MI) of bone marrow cells scored in induced-SY mice a highly significant increase (p<0.0001). On contrary, CU-oral feeding revealed a significant decrease (p<0.05) in MI. The micronucleated peripheral mature and immature erythrocytes of SY-group demonstrated a significant elevation (p<0.0001) in the frequency of micronucleus. This study concluded that the probability of replacement of the ingested synthetic sunset yellow with the nutraceutical curcumin as a food, beverage or drug colourant to avoid its cytotoxicity and genotoxicity.
 

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