Colored Contact Lenses
Colored contact lenses are types of contact lenses used for temporarily changing the color of the eye. These lenses can be for cosmetic purposes, or they can be used for therapeutic purposes and also to correct visual errors such as farsightedness, nearsightedness, or astigmatism.
Types of colored contact lenses
Colored contact lens has two parts. The central or optical part, which covers the pupil. Lights enter the eye through this part and it is not colored. Otherwise, you will see the world in colors and your vision will be blurry.
The second part of the lens is the outer part or the colored part and it covers the colored part of the eye or the iris.
Visibility tint Contacts
This contact lens is not a true colored contact lens. It has a faint color, usually light green or light blue, just to help you find the lens in case you drop it. This kind won’t affect the color of your eyes.
Enhancement tint Contacts
This type of contact lens enhances and intensifies the natural color of the light-colored eye rather than a dramatic change of the color of the eye. It will not, for example, make a brown eye appears green. Examples of enhancing contact lenses are freshlook colorblends and Acuvue Define.
Opaque tint Contacts
This type of colored lens is opaque and non-transparent thus, it can change the color of your eye completely. For example, it can change dark brown eyes into blue eyes. Colored contacts with opaque tints come in a wide variety of colors, including brown, green, hazel, violet, blue, grey, amethyst and grey.
Costume contact lenses or theatrical contact lenses
Custom Colored Contact Lenses are opaque tints lenses with a special effect such as Halloween contact Lenses, fashion lenses and crazy looking contact lenses.
How to Choose the Right Colored Contact Lenses
There are many factors to consider to choose the right color for you, such as skin tone, hair color, your natural eye color, clothes you wear and for what purposes.
Custom colored contact lenses
Prosthetic Contact lenses are specially designed for people with abnormal eye, such as those with injured eye or congenital eye defects. These lenses are customized to replicate the natural color of the healthy eye and they help to eliminate the emotional trauma that those people suffered from abnormal looking eyes.
Therapeutic colored lenses have medical and therapeutic values. For example, they can be used as an eye occlude to eliminate double vision in patients with large iris defects and many patients prefer these lenses over eye patches.
Patients with abnormal iris defects usually suffer from diplopia and light sensitivity or photophobia and these lenses are made to eliminate these problems. People with a certain hereditary color deficiency can have some benefits from the customized colored lens
Sport contact lenses are customized colored lenses with various color tints to help professional athletes to enhance visual performances by maximizing contrast sensitivity and depth perception and also by reducing glare.
Main problems that you might face with colored contact lenses
- Movement of lenses with blinking. With blinking, the lens might slide over the eye and this slide might be visible to other people, especially if you wear an opaque colored lens.
- The size of the central translucent part is fixed, but your natural pupil is not. Normally the size of the pupil is small during the daytime and large at night. Pupil control the amount of lights enter that eye so when you wear colored contact lenses, especially opaque tint, your vision might be slightly reduced at night.
Are colored contact lenses safe?
The first thing you should do to ensure that colored lenses are safe is to purchase these lenses with a prescription from your optometrist or eye doctor. There are many brands in the market and you don’t know the quality of these lenses, their storage conditions and what materials they are made of.
The second thing is to follow your optometrist’s guidelines and instructions regarding how to clean those lenses, how long you should wear them, how frequently you should follow up with your optometrist and what are the warning symptoms to visit an eye doctor.
Do you need a prescription for colored contact lenses?
FDA considers contact lenses as medical devices; thus, it is illegal to buy them over the counter. To buy them, you require a valid prescription from either an optometrist or ophthalmologist.
The ocular examination is very important before wearing contact lenses. There are certain measurements and tests that should be done by your optometrist or ophthalmologist at the clinic to ensure good contact lens fitting and also to ensure that your eye normally responds to contact lenses.
