Schedule an appointment Contact Lenses
Do you love the idea of seeing clearly thanks to contact lenses? At Clayton Eye Center, our experienced team is here to help you find the best contact lenses for your eyes and ensure you feel comfortable putting them in and taking them out.
How Do I Get Contact Lenses?
Before you can get contact lenses, you’ll undergo a medical and refractive eye exam. These ensure that your eyes are a good fit for wearing contact lenses.
During this appointment, we’ll also discuss how to care for your contact lenses, insert, and remove them. You’ll need to come back for annual contact lens exams to ensure your prescription stays up to date. Each prescription for contacts only lasts a year, as it’s common for your eyes to change slightly between visits.
How to Insert and Remove Contact Lenses
If you’ve never worn contact lenses, putting them in and taking them out can seem daunting. But wearing contact lenses will seem easy once you’ve done it a few times. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Before beginning, start by washing your hands thoroughly with soap and water.
- Make sure to dry your hands on a lint-free towel to avoid getting any lint on your lenses.
- Open your contact lens storage case or remove it from its sealed packaging using your fingertips. Do not use your nails, as this may tear the lens.
- Depending on your comfort level, you can place the lens directly into the palm of your hand from your storage case or sealed packaging or put the lens on the index finger of your dominant hand.
- Check to make sure your lens is not inside out. Look at its shape. If it looks like a teacup with the sides turned out, it’s inside out. Your lens should resemble the shape of a bowl.
- After checking your lens, use your other index finger or middle finger to gently hold your upper eyelid up towards your eyebrow to keep your eyelashes out of the way.
- Use your middle finger on your dominant hand to pull your lower eyelid down.
- Look up towards the ceiling or stare straight ahead to slowly bring your contact lens toward your eye before placing it in the center of your eye.
- After putting the contact in your eye, look down and gently blink a few times to help ensure your lens is in the correct position.
- After ensuring the proper placement, release your eyelids to check that your eyes feel comfortable, and you can see clearly.
Follow these steps when removing your contact lenses:
- Wash your hands using soap and water and dry them with a lint-free towel.
- Once your hands are dry, look up toward the ceiling and use the middle finger on your dominant hand to gently pull down your lower eyelid.
- Use the index finger on your dominant hand to touch the lower edge of your contact lens. Then, gently slide your contact down towards the bottom of your eye.
- As you move your contact lens down, gently squeeze it between your thumb and index finger.
- Once you’ve removed it from your eye, make sure to put it back into your case with new solution if you do not wear dailies. If you wear dailies, throw the contact away.
Spherical Contact Lenses
Spherical contact lenses are usually best for nearsighted, farsighted, or presbyopia patients. They are soft contact lenses that replicate the eye’s spherical surface. Their optical power is the same in different parts of the lens.
Multifocal Contact Lenses
Multifocal contact lenses have different lens powers to target vision at varying distances. These contacts have multiple prescriptions on one lens.
There is usually a prescription for seeing things further away and another for seeing things at intermediate distances. Multifocal contact lenses are helpful for patients with presbyopia who struggle to see things up close clearly due to the natural lens of the eye losing flexibility with age.
Astigmatism Contact Lenses
Astigmatism contact lenses, known as toric contact lenses, are the best contacts for patients with astigmatism. Astigmatism occurs when the cornea is an irregular shape.
When your cornea is not round but like the shape of a football, it causes your vision to be blurry at all distances. You may also suffer from other refractive errors like nearsightedness or farsightedness.
Toric contact lenses are the only contacts specifically designed to correct astigmatism while wearing them. The shape of a toric contact lens creates different refractive powers to help correct astigmatism.
These contacts achieve this because they have a thicker zone to keep them from rotating while they are in your eyes. It also ensures that you’ll experience consistent visual acuity.
Colored Contact Lenses
For those looking to change their appearance, colored contact lenses can be highly appealing. Colored contact lenses come in two kinds: those that correct your vision and change your eye color while wearing them and those that are purely worn for cosmetic reasons.
Colored contact lenses work by altering how the iris appears. The iris is the colored part of the eye.
Colored contact lenses come in different tints, including visibility, enhancement, opaque, blending, and custom.
Regardless of the kind of colored contact lenses you get, you must purchase them with a prescription. Getting colored contact lenses without a prescription is illegal. These lenses may also not meet FDA safety standards and could cause severe damage to your eyes.
Daily Contact Lenses
Daily contact lenses are contacts designed to be worn for one day before discarding them. These are the most popular form of contact lenses.
Their popularity comes because there’s no maintenance to worry about. With these contact lenses, you’ll put them in at the beginning of your day and take them out before bed.
You’ll discard them when you take them out in the evening instead of putting them in a contact lens case filled with solution. You won’t have to worry about lenses getting scratched or lost with dailies.
You also won’t have to consider if you’ve been wearing them too long, leading to eye damage or infections. Because you only wear dailies for one day, there’s no deterioration in the quality of your vision due to wearing them over time.
With other kinds of contact lenses, lipids, proteins, and calcium can build up on the lenses as you wear them. These substances are naturally found in your tears and may make your contacts feel less comfortable while making you more prone to eye infections.
Choosing daily contact lenses helps ensure your eyes feel comfortable without concerns over wear time on one pair of contact lenses.
Do you want to wear contact lenses? Request your appointment at Clayton Eye Center in Morrow, GA, today!
