Contact Lenses Care

“I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was when the doctor put in my contacts for the first time. A whole new world opened up for me—finally I could see what I really looked like. A miracle, because I hadn’t seen myself without glasses for as long as I could remember. I was the classic four-eyes: the studious, introverted, myopic kid . . . always ‘losing’ my specs because I hated them so. I was really unpopular in high school; by then my lenses resembled Coke bottles. I only wore the despised spectacles when I had to, which meant I never said hello to anybody. How could I? I couldn’t see them! But I kept squinting through life, convinced that the only two people who belonged in glasses were Phil Silvers and Woody Allen. Then a friend of mine got a pair of contact lenses. She looked great; she loved them; I decided to join her. That was literally the beginning of a whole new life for me. I admit I had a hard time adjusting; but I wanted to be free of glasses more than anything in the world, so I stuck to it. It was worth it. My new appearance gave me the impetus to go on a diet, no less, and to come out of my shy, retiring shell. Now it’s sixteen years later and I still get a thrill when people tell me ‘What beautiful eyes you have.’ I can’t imagine ever living without contacts.”

The standard hard lens is the grandfather of all the modern contact lenses. It’s still quite popular, but advancements in the other types of contacts have caused hard-lens use to decline at a rate of 10 to 15 percent each year. Hard (or, to use more pleasant terms, “rigid” or “firm”) contact lenses are small, firm, plastic discs that rest on the cornea of the eye, cushioned by a layer of tears. The plastic from which conventional hard lenses are made is called PMMA (polymethyl methacrylate) and is similar to Lucite and Plexiglas. PMMA has an excellent optical quality and has been proven to be nontoxic, stable, and highly resistant to warpage.

Hard contact lenses are, relatively speaking, “old hat” by now. There are dozens and dozens of manufacturers who, by and large, offer the same product. Unlike soft lenses, hard lenses do not require the rigorous testing and Food and Drug Administration approval before they can be legally dispensed. “First quality” hard contact lenses merely have to follow the voluntary standards set up by the American National Standards Institute. Based on information gathered over several decades of hard contact lens use, these standards apply to the following lens properties: hardness, strength, flexibility, scratch resistance, resistance to impact, absorption of saline and distilled water, gas permeability, wetting angle, light transmission, heat distortion, and shelf life.

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