Amazon SES can't send email to non-verified email address

Question

I'm trying to send an email using Amazon SES. I've had this working with the us-east-1 region and just switched my region to eu-east-1 and I can't send an email to my personal gmail account. I have verified the from address, the error is explicitly asking to verifiy the to address, which seems super odd. What's going wrong here? If I change the to email to match the from it works, which is super odd.

Email address is not verified. The following identities failed the check in region

Answer 1

Do you have this at the top of your SES dashboard?

If so it's because you need to request to be approved out of "sandbox" mode.