This post will be an ode to contact lenses, which I just started wearing at the age of 27. They’re amazing! I wish I’d started wearing them sooner. No one in my life ever encouraged me to wear contacts–if anything, there seemed to be some gentle stigma surrounding them. Contact lenses were the vain cosmetic choice for those who thought glasses made them look worse. But I never heard about all the benefits of contacts! An incomplete list:

  • you see better in contacts than glasses
    • so you’re better at sports and driving
  • they’re less hassle during the day
    • no need to constantly clean them
    • no need to readjust them on your face
  • their cost is similar to glasses
  • they don’t leave marks on your nose!
  • kissing is better in contacts 😉

Misconceptions about contact lenses.

1) they’re not secure, so they can fall out at any moment–and they’re liable to roll up behind your eyeball at any moment! In fact, they have an almost amazing ability to sit right on your pupil. It’s like that’s where they want to be, like there’s some magnetic force keeping them right on your iris. I don’t understand it but that’s how they really behave. 2) Contacts are for vain people. If anything, the plethora of fashionable and affordable glasses options has produced a moment where glasses are a desirable accessory. Just search amazon for “fake glasses” and be amazed by the many products with thousands of reviews. One friend to whom I was raving about contact lenses expressed that he won’t switch because he thinks he looks better in glasses! The bottom line is, there shouldn’t be any stigma on either side but contact lenses certainly aren’t a vain choice.

Challenges

It’s undeniably hard to get started wearing contacts–the first few times you insert and remove your contacts you’ll probably fail in various ways and it’ll be difficult and uncomfortable. My first time trying to insert them myself, under the watchful eye of my optometrist, I struggled so hard I was dripping tears and said aloud “why am I doing this to myself??” my optometrist reminded me, “because you’re going to see better!” I had a misconception that people who wear contacts accustom their eyes to being touched. Something about desensitizing your eyeballs seemed wrong to me. But that’s not the whole story. I think it’s more about technique: you learn how to handle the contacts in a way that bothers your eye less (for me it’s applying the contacts to the lower white of my eye instead of right on the pupil, which is more sensitive). It just takes a few tries to learn what’s easier on your eye. Just keep in mind all the sweet benefits as you work at it! Your vision is so important, and you should be willing to deal with some discomfort to improve your seeing experience.

I’ll admit, even when you’re good at handling your contacts it’s a little bit more uncomfortable to insert them in the morning than it is to throw on some glasses. But that upfront investment pays off over the course of the day of not dealing with glasses.

When I started wearing contacts I was blown away by their success as a technology–it’s insane how well they work, specifically how they magically sit right on your pupil all day. So I read a little history on wikipedia, and was suprised to learn that contacts have a long history going back to Leonardo da Vinci and Descartes, who both imagined contact lenses before they were practical to create. And people have been trying to get it to work ever since. It’s only fairly recently, in 1998, that cheap, oxygen-permeable contact lenses made of silicone hydrogel came to market. Before then, many attempts at contact lenses were made of glass (!) and were not oxygen-permeable. And they were expensive, so much so that an insurance company for contacts, called Replacement Lens Inc achieved great success between 1965 and 1994. In 1994 it gave up on insuring contacts because they’d become so affordable and reliable.1 Their loss is our gain–we’re living in the golden age of contact lenses, and we should take advantage!

  1. But interestingly Replacement Lens Inc still exists! They pivoted to become a multi-billion-dollar publicly traded insurance company known as RLI Corp. ↩