Contact Lenses
Contact lenses are thin, transparent plastic discs that are worn in the eye to improve vision. Contact lenses float on the tear film that protects your cornea.
Contact lenses, like glasses, treat visual impairments caused by refractive defects. A refractive error occurs when the eye fails to correctly refract (bend or focus) light entering the eye, resulting in a fuzzy image.
Contact lenses will treat individuals with the following refractive flaws:
- hyperopia (farsightedness)
- presbyopia (changes to near vision that normally happen with age)
- myopia (nearsightedness)
- astigmatism (distorted vision)
Types of Contact Lenses
Contacts are manufactured of a variety of plastics. Hard and soft contact lenses are the two most prevalent varieties of contact lenses.
Hard contact lenses
A rigid gas-permeable (RGP) lens is the most common form of hard contact lens. These lenses are often comprised of a combination of plastic and other materials. They maintain their form while allowing oxygen to pass through the lens to your eye.
RGP lenses are very beneficial for patients who suffer from astigmatism and keratoconus. This is because they give sharper vision than soft lenses when the cornea is abnormally bent. People who have allergies or tend to get protein deposits on their contacts may also prefer RGP lenses.
Soft contact lenses
The majority of individuals choose to wear soft contact lenses. This is because they tend to be more comfortable and there are many options. Here are a few examples of soft lenses.
Daily Contact Lenses
You wear these when you are awake and remove them before you go to sleep. Many are disposable, which means you have to wear a new set of contacts every day. Alternatively, you might go for contacts that last longer and only need to be updated once a week, every two weeks, or once a month. If you just use contacts once in a while, some ophthalmologists prescribe disposable daily use contacts.
Weekly or Monthly Contact Lenses
These can be worn when sleeping, however they must be removed at least once a week for cleaning. These contacts are less commonly recommended by eye doctors since they raise the risk of a severe eye infection.
Toric Lenses
These can help persons with astigmatism correct their vision, although not as much as hard contact lenses. Toric lenses can be used on a daily or prolonged basis. However, they are frequently more expensive than other forms of soft contact lenses.
Colored contact lenses:
To modify the colour of your eyes, vision-correcting contact lenses can be coloured. They are available as daily wear, extended wear, and toric lenses.
Contact lenses to correct presbyopia:
Presbyopia contacts are intended to remedy the natural vision issues that occur beyond the age of 40, when it becomes more difficult to view close things properly. These corrective lenses come in a variety of styles.
These alternatives include bifocal or multifocal contact lenses, as well as monovision correction, which involves wearing a close vision lens in one eye and a distant vision lens in the other.
