Enjoy the freedom of contact lenses

Soft contact lenses get their name from that the way they conform to the shape of your eye. Thin, gel-like membranes are comfortable and stay in place well, making soft contact lenses an excellent choice if you are active and play sports. Soft contact lenses can be used to correct most vision problems, including myopia (short sightedness), hyperopia (long sightedness) and astigmatism and are also available in bifocal and multifocal designs for the over 40’s.

Soft contact lenses come in Re-wearable, Single Use Daily and Continuous Wear options.

Types of soft contact lenses

Single Use Contact lenses – Individually packaged single use contact lenses are often called daily contact lenses. You wear a fresh pair every day then remove and dispose of them before you go to sleep at night. Easy, comfortable, and convenient, they are ideal if you don’t wear contact lenses every day, have sensitive eyes or hayfever.

Re-wearable Contact lenses – Re-wearable contact lenses are designed to be worn daily and reused for a pre-planned time e.g. a week or month. Typically, you insert the lenses in the morning and remove them at night. Cleaning and care systems are quick and easy. Re-wearable soft contact lenses may be more economical than single use contact lenses and are available in a greater range of optical powers, designs and materials.

Continuous Wear Contact lenses – Ideal for people who have trouble handling lenses, or like the ultimate convenience of not having to remove and clean them. Continuous wear soft contact lenses are designed to be worn continuously, without being taken out of the eye during the day, or at night — for a predetermined period up to 30 days.

Rigid gas permeable (RGP) lenses, or hard contact lenses, are a little smaller and more rigid than soft contact lenses. They are called gas-permeable lenses because they allow oxygen to pass through the contact lens to the eye, thus reducing the risk of infection. Ideal for people with complex prescriptions, these lenses are used to correct vision problems such as large refractive errors, high astigmatism, and keratoconus.  Hard contact lenses are durable and easy to care for. If your prescription doesn’t change and you take care of your hard contact lenses, you can use the same pair for two to three years.

Sometimes specialised contact lenses are the best, or even the only choice for optimum vision. They may include specially made re-wearable soft lenses, rigid lenses, or some of the other options below:

• Bifocal contact lenses – Bifocal contact lenses have two prescriptions on one contact lens — one for distance vision correction and the other for near vision. Bifocal lenses are available in daily wear soft and gas-permeable materials and can provide vision as good as your glasses, at all distances.
• Monovision (Blended vision) contact lenses – With these contact lenses your vision is corrected in a strategically asymmetric way, with one lens focussing your reading prescription and the other your distance prescription. You might also try a modified monovision contact lens strategy, in which you wear a bifocal or multifocal lens in one eye and a single-vision lens in the other eye.
• Semi Scleral contact lenses – Semi scleral (or Miniscleral lenses) are much larger in size (Diameter) than other contact lenses and they are ideal for people with irregular corneal curvature (keratoconus) or have trouble wearing gas-permeable lenses.
• Hybrid contact lenses – Featuring a gas-permeable centre surrounded by a soft outer ring, hybrid contact lenses may be an option if you have an irregular corneal curvature (keratoconus) or have trouble wearing gas-permeable lenses.
• Tinted and Cosmetic coloured contact lenses – Used for either cosmetic or therapeutic purposes, these lenses can enhance colour perception or help compensate for colour blindness. Available to order, custom-coloured lenses are useful to mask a disfigured or scarred eye and can be painted to match the normal eye.
• Ortho K or Overnight Corneal Refractive Therapy – (CRT or Orthokeratology) is a vision correction option which offers a fully reversible, non-surgical vision correction that gives you clear comfortable vision all day without the use of either glasses or ordinary contact lenses. This process involves wearing specially shaped rigid contact lenses at night while you sleep to precisely re-shape the cornea so that when the contact lenses are removed in the morning, you get clear sharp and corrected vision the whole of the next day. This option is particularly useful in the following situations:
• Myopia Control: There is an increasing body of evidence that this technique can slow or even halt the progression of myopia in children. Presently this is the only available vision correction to show this effect when critically studied.
• Water Sports: Surfing, Water Skiing, Diving, Swimming, Windsurfing.
• Daytime Contact Lens Intolerance: Dry or Dusty Environments, Artificial climates or Airconditioning.
• Age: At less than 1/3 of the cost of laser eye surgery, this process is very affordable, and can be used as an interim strategy until you are old enough to have corrective surgery. CRT is also completely (Usually reversible should you prefer to revert back to glasses or normal contact lenses).