Contact lenses are for you if you don’t want to wear eyeglasses all day or undergo LASIK surgery. These small, curve-shaped devices that fit directly to your eyes come in different types, each providing a specific purpose for vision correction.
Dr. Joel H. McGahen, your trusted low vision specialist, discusses them further in this blog post.
Soft Contact Lenses
These contacts are made from hydrogels and are the type that most people wear. Their thin, pliable composition is why they adhere to the shape of the front surface of the eyes. The introduction of these products in the 1970s helped usher the popularity of contact lenses among consumers due to their immediate comfort.
Soft contact lenses come in different variations. The daily-use ones are the most common. These are contacts you wear when you wake up and remove before you sleep. Those that you wear even while you sleep are extended-use contacts. People with astigmatism wear toric contacts. All of these can either be clear or tinted with a specific color. Other soft contacts are for cosmetic purposes only.
Hard Contact Lenses
Before there were soft contacts, there were those that were hard and rigid. The first contacts utilized polymethyl methacrylate or PMMA. This material provides good optics. They were, however, difficult to adapt to because they didn’t transmit oxygen well.
In response to this, rigid gas-permeable (RGP) lenses were introduced later on. They are like PMMA contacts but more porous, which means oxygen can pass through them. These kinds of contacts are for people with eye conditions like astigmatism and keratoconus. They find RGP lenses as comfortable as their soft counterparts, though they have to adjust and adapt to these contacts on their first few days or weeks of use.
Many contact lenses have features that help correct vision problems. Turn to a trusted eye doctor to prescribe you with the right type of lenses for your situation. Our eye care center provides a wide range of services, including providing patients with prescription eyewear and conducting eye exams. Call us at (717) 609-4443 to learn more about them. We serve Pennsylvania residents, including those living in Shippensburg and Greencastle, PA.