Treated Contact Lenses
Contact lenses are not always a uniform material. Many incorporate dyes, UV protection and other compounds that increase the value and usefulness of the lens to the wearer.
Simple tinting is an option for those who want to alter their natural eye color. Blue, brown, green and even mirrored lenses (sometimes lenses that have actual designs!) are all possible. Whether for holidays like Halloween or just to expand cosmetic options, tints provide the option of changing the color of the iris.
They fall into several categories. Visibility tints are the most subtle, intended only to make the contacts easy to see for easier handling. Enhancement tints are a richer dye that does change the hue of your natural eye color. They won’t change your color from, say, blue to brown but can give blue or green eyes a more vibrant look. Opaque lenses can completely alter the color, say from blue to brown, or even give a mirror effect that is popular at parties.
The dyes are safe and don’t affect wear characteristics like flexibility or permeability, nor the lens usable lifetime. As such, they’re as comfortable as any other type and equally safe. Most dyes will eventually fade somewhat, but the effect is subtle enough that most lenses will get replaced long before it becomes an issue.
Depending on the type, though, they can reduce visual acuity somewhat. Opaque lenses reduce the amount of light coming through. Wearing some in low light, such as at a Halloween party requires extra care. Driving isn’t recommended. Some types are made with a small hole in the center over the pupil to let in normal amounts of light.
Other forms of coating or infusion can be done to enhance the contact lens. UV filtering is one of the most common. Reduction of the amount of UV that enters the eye is already mostly performed by the upper atmosphere. But some does get through, enough to provide the sunscreen manufacturers with a healthy income. That remaining UV is enough not only to harm skin cells but your eyes as well. Reducing UV further helps ease eye strain and protect the eye that much more.
Other forms of coating or infusion help alter the amount of portions of the visible light spectrum. That can enhance sports activity, for example, by shifting the colors that are part of white light. The physical result is less of certain wavelengths. The vision result is higher acuity and color sharpness for certain people under certain circumstances. Removing 90% of the blue light, for example, helps change the way people perceive their immediate environment.
Yellow tennis balls appear more vivid against the background of the court and ground. Colored golf balls stand out more against the fairway and green, and even the blue sky. That effect is often desired by tennis players, golfers and even beach volleyball players. Other designs help reduce glare by adding polarization. Athletes report an enhanced ability to see the ball against the background, improving reaction times and accuracy.
Investigate the options available in tinted or treated contact lenses and see if these added features are right for you.
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How To Care For Contact Lenses
Caring for contact lenses, unless they are worn once and thrown away, is simple but does require regular effort.
The first rule of caring for contact lenses is: clean, clean, clean. It doesn’t have to be an obsession, but keeping contact lenses clean and sterile is the best way to minimize the odds of eye health problems.
Before you can hope to keep the lenses clean with solution, you have to keep your hands clean. Until someone devises a way to insert the lenses without using your fingers, that remains the most common route for micro-organisms to invade your eyes. Those little creatures live in water, air and on the surface of your hands. Before handling contacts, always wash your hands thoroughly with warm water and soap.
The next step is keeping each lens itself clean. All come pre-packaged in a sterile solution that has been treated to eliminate any organisms. So, you start out with a clean field, as the professionals say. Keeping it that way requires proper handling and cleaning.
Older cleaning solutions (some types of which are still around) contained preservatives that could encourage the growth of compounds that could affect the eye. Some still require putting the contact in the palm of your hand with a small amount of solution and rubbing the lens with the tip of your finger.
That method still works and health problems are few and far between. But newer rub-free solutions lower the risk further. It’s also a small added convenience. Some solutions don’t require rinsing, either, which lowers health risks still more.
If your contacts are designed to be removed and re-used (as many still are), they need to be handled and stored correctly, too.
You can’t avoid finger contact since there’s no other way to get the lens in or out. Though, permanent, implantable lenses are making great strides! But be sure to move the lens directly from your finger into a sterile cleaning solution. Don’t rest it on the counter first. That only ups the odds of picking up surface dirt, bacteria that live on countertops and other nasty things that will pollute the cleaning solution. Never re-use solution, either.
Keep the lenses covered to prevent airborne germs from getting continual, easy access to them and the cleaning solution when they’re sitting overnight.
Be sure to follow the manufacturer’s and your eye care professional’s guidance about your specific type of contact lens. They both have considerable experience in keeping your contacts in the best shape and minimizing the risks of eye problems. The research performed over the past 50 years on eye health and contact lenses is vast and both have incorporated that knowledge into their practices. Benefit from that.
Caring for contact lenses can quickly become a simple, quick routine that optimizes your contacts wear lifetime and your eye health. Just follow these common sense guidelines and enjoy your vision.
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How Contact Lenses Work
A clear, relatively hard mound of tissue called the cornea sits in front of the pupil of the eye. Behind the pupil is the lens that focuses light onto the retina, which creates reactions that stimulate the optic nerve to send signals to the visual cortex in the brain. That, in a nutshell, is what makes sight possible. But along the way several things can go wrong.
With age (usually) or disease, or simply because of genetics, the shape of the lens and eyeball can and do become distorted. That distortion also affects the shape of the cornea. The change in shape causes the light rays to focus in front of the retina, behind it, or to be scattered in several directions.
In the first case, the result is nearsightedness or myopia. That is the ability to see things near, but far things appear out of focus. Reading a book is easy, reading road signs while driving can be difficult or impossible without contact lenses or glasses.
When the rays would focus at a point behind the retina the effect is to produce farsightedness, also called hyperopia. Farsightedness is the ability to see things sharply that are (relatively) far away, but things up close look blurry. Reading road signs is easy, reading text on your computer without contact lenses or glasses becomes impossible.
The third case is a little different from either of the other two. In this instance, the eyeball can be misshapen or out of round, making the cornea and lens an improper shape. That produces a condition called astigmatism, the effect of which is to make images appear blurry whether near or far. That double-whammy is one of the reasons that, until recently, it was difficult to produce contact lenses or use laser eye surgery to correct this.
But the solution is (today) straightforward. Insert another lens between the light rays and the human eye’s lens. That works like a camera, which has multiple pieces of glass that can work together to focus the rays onto the film. In this case the ‘film’ is the retina. For centuries, this was done by using glasses, today, contact lenses offer an option enjoyed by millions.
The extra lenses (the contact lenses) ‘float’ on a thin layer of tear-like moisture over the cornea. Because of liquid surface tension and the shape of the eye – carefully matched by shaping the contact lens just right – the lenses can stay on and stay in place.
In short, in technical language, they change the refractive angle of the light. Refract is just a fancy word meaning ‘to bend’. That’s exactly what the lenses do. They bend the light a little bit. It’s bent a little more by the cornea, lens and fluid in the eye and – when everything is adjusted just right – the light is focused sharply onto the retina. The net result is to provide the type of array the visual cortex can correctly process as ‘car’ or ‘baby’ or whatever you happen to be looking at.
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