Soft Contact Lenses - Designs and Materials

Types of Soft Contact Lenses

You'll find many types of soft contact lenses in the market. Their major groupings are according to schedules of replacement and wearing.

The other categorization is based on types of vision corrections -- spherical and specialty. The following list provides a brief description of each type:

Wearing Schedules types consist of daily wear and extended wear. Daily wear means that lenses can only be worn while you're awake. You need to remove and clean them at night. Extended wear means that you are allowed to wear the lenses overnight for up to 6 consecutive days. You can sleep in extended wear soft lenses, although most doctors recommend wearing overnight occasionally to prevent eye infections.

Replacement schedules types can range from traditional or reusable to disposable. Reusable lenses are the conventional type of contacts. Today, except for extreme prescriptions, most doctors prefer not to prescribe reusable lenses since a number of wearers develop eye irritation and/or allergy.

Disposable lenses are replaced every two weeks, or sooner. They are only worn once and then thrown away. Since you don't need to clean your contact lenses, dry eye and irritation related to contact solutions are reduced. Also, if you easily suffer an allergy, the contact lenses are right for you. These lenses are available for nearsighted and farsighted correction.

Between disposable and reusable there are planned or frequent replacement types. Planned replacement types are replaced monthly or quarterly. The 30-day replacement, for example, use silicone hydrogel lenses -- new-generation contacts that transmit up to six times more oxygen to the eye than standard disposable contacts. You can safely wear these lenses up to 30 days without removal.

For cosmetic use, there are colored contact lenses that are available in a variety of tinted colors. These types offer theatrical contacts, which make your eyes look like those of a vampire, for example. These types of contacts are popular around Halloween.

Based on types of vision corrected, there are spherical, toric, and bifocal lenses. Spherical types have a single prescription power 360 degrees around the lens. Toric contacts contain both a spherical and cylinder component to correct astigmatism. Bifocal contact lenses have a variety of designs to correct near vision and distance vision.

Soft Contact Lens Materials

Soft lenses come in soft silicon-based material, also called silicon hydrogel. Soft lenses are categorized by the amount of water they contain. They can have either low or high moisture content. A low moisture content lens has less than 50 percent and a high moisture content lens contains more than 50 percent moisture. Overall these lenses usually contain from 25% to 79% water.

These very flexible, seemingly weightless lens materials are eye friendly. They are easy to adapt and are comfortable. You don't need a longer time to get accustomed to them.

As soft contact lenses do not only correct vision problem, for aesthetic purposes colors and designs have been added to contacts. These are making soft lenses more colorful for cosmetic or fashion purposes. With costumes, party, and sport designs, they also help you appear confidently at special occasions while maintain their functionality.

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