Introduction to How Contact Lenses Work
To the millions of Americans with vision problems, the world can be a blurry place. For people who need vision correction but don’t want to wear glasses, contact lenses offer an easy, virtually invisible solution.
Although nearly 36 million Americans wear contact lenses, not everyone wears them to correct vision problems. Celebrities use contact lenses to change the color of their eyes, athletes put them on to give them extra-sharp vision on the field, and others use them to make Halloween costumes more realistic.
In this article, we’ll learn how contact lenses correct sight, look at the variety of lens options that are available and find out how to wear them safely.
What are Contact Lenses?
Contact lenses are thin transparent plastic discs that sit on the cornea. Just like eyeglasses, they correct refractive errors such as myopia (nearsightedness) and hyperopia (farsightedness). With these conditions, the eye doesn’t focus light directly on the retina as it should, leading to blurry vision. Contact lenses are shaped based on the vision problem to help the eye focus light directly on the retina.
Contact lenses are closer to natural sight than eyeglasses. They move with your eye and correct the refractive error closer to the eye to allow for a more natural field of vision. They don’t get in the way of your line of sight, like glasses can. Contact lenses can be worn all day, or even several weeks at a time, so you don’t have to worry about putting them on and taking them off.
Contact lenses stay in place by sticking to the layer of tear fluid that floats on the surface of the eye. Eyelid pressure also holds them in place. As the eye blinks, it provides lubrication to the cornea and helps flush away any impurities that may have become stuck to the lens.
Next, we’ll look at some vision problems and find out how contact lenses can correct them.
Vision Problems and Contact Solutions
Before we begin talking specifically about contacts, let’s review how vision works and how lenses correct refractive vision problems. If you’ve already read How Vision Works and How Refractive Vision Works you may want to skip to the next section.
For people with normal vision, light rays enter the cornea in the front of the eye and are focused into a single point on the retina in the back of the eye. Once it hits the retina, the light is converted into signals, which go to the brain to be processed into images.
Sometimes the cornea doesn’t focus light precisely on the retina because of a refractive error. The contact lens refracts, or bends light, so that it focuses correctly on the retina. Its shape is based on the type of vision problem that needs to be corrected. How much the lens bends light, or its strength, is expressed in diopters. The higher the diopter, the stronger the lens.
If the eyeball is too long, causing it to focus light rays in front of the retina, the result is myopia, or nearsightedness. People with myopia can see clearly close-up, but their distance vision is blurry. To correct myopia, the contact lens is thinner at the center than at the edges. These lenses are called minus, or concave. They spread the light away from the center of the lens and move the focal point of the light forward, so that it reaches the retina.
Hyperopia, or farsightedness, happens when the eyeball is too short, causing it to focus light rays behind the retina. People with hyperopia can see clearly far away, but their close-up vision is blurry. To correct hyperopia, the lens is thicker at the center and thinner at the edges. These lenses are called plus, or convex. The lens bends the light toward the center and moves the focal point back so that light is focused on, rather than behind, the retina.
An irregularly-shaped cornea causes light to focus at several points, distorting vision. This is called astigmatism. To correct astigmatism, the lens is designed specifically to the individual’s correction needs. Whereas lenses used to correct myopia and hyperopia are spherical (the power correction is the same throughout the lens) astigmatism requires a special lens, called a toric lens.
Toric contact lenses are made from the same materials as spherical lenses, but they have different angled curvatures to correct vision specifically for each individual. Toric lenses may be thicker in certain parts of the lens and thinner in other parts. They have two powers: one to correct for astigmatism, and the other to correct for myopia or hyperopia, if needed. They are also weighted more along the bottom or have thin edges along the top and bottom to keep them fixed in one position on the eye.
With presbyopia, the eye loses its ability to accommodate from near to far focus. This often occurs as people get older. Because presbyopia requires both near and far correction, people with this error often require special bifocal or multifocal lenses:
A concentric bifocal lens has the near correction in a small circle at the center of the lens, and the distance correction in the outer lens surrounding it (alternately, the distance correction can be placed in the center of the lens and the near correction on the outside of the lens).
A translating lens mimics bifocal glasses. The lens is divided, with the distance correction at the top and the near correction at the bottom.
An aspheric lens places both the near and far correction near the center of the lens.
Some people with presbyopia may need a technique called monovision. It uses the dominant eye for distance vision, and the other eye for near vision. Each eye is fitted with a different lens appropriate for the vision correction needed.
In the next section, we’ll look at the different types of contact lenses available.
Types of Contact Lenses
Originally, all contact lenses were made of a hard plastic called polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). This is the same plastic used to make Plexiglas. But hard lenses don’t absorb water, which is needed to help oxygen pass through the lens and into the cornea. Because the eye needs oxygen to stay healthy, hard lenses can cause the wearer a lot of irritation and discomfort. The upside to these lenses is that they are relatively easy to clean because bacteria don’t stick very well to them.
Soft contact lenses are more pliable and easier to wear than hard lenses because they’re made of a soft, gel-like plastic. Soft lenses are hydrophilic, or “water loving,” and absorb water. This allows oxygen to flow to the eye and makes the lens flexible and more comfortable to wear. Many companies bill their soft contact lenses as “breathable” because they transmit a high amount of oxygen to the eye. Letting more oxygen reach the eye means that you can wear soft contact lenses for longer periods with less chance of irritation.
Several different types of soft contact lenses are available:
Daily-wear lenses - You remove these each night before going to bed.
Extended-wear lenses - You can wear these for several days or weeks without removing them.
Disposable lenses - You can wear these lenses for a day, a week, or even several weeks before throwing them away.
Color-tinted or cosmetic lenses - These lenses change the color of your eyes or tint them for clearer vision outdoors. Other cosmetic lenses drastically change the eye’s appearance. Many people use them for the theater or for Halloween.
Ultraviolet (UV) protection lenses - These lenses protect against harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.
Corneal reshaping lenses - You wear these lenses overnight and they gradually reshape the cornea to correct your vision. When you take them out, you can temporarily see clearly without contact lenses.
Rigid, gas-permeable lenses, which were developed in the late 1970s, are made from a combination of PMMA, silicone, and fluoropolymers (a type of porous plastic). These lenses combine some of the features of hard and soft contact lenses. They’re more durable than soft lenses, but they still allow oxygen to pass into the eye, making them more comfortable to wear than hard lenses. Because they don’t contain water, they are less likely to develop bacteria and cause infection than soft lenses. The rigidity of the lens provides clear, crisp vision.
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