Contact Lenses

Contact lenses work by floating on a continually refreshed pool of tears. The types of lens required for successful wearing will be decided by your eye’s ability to provide adequate tear flow, the shape of your cornea (the front window of the eye), the prescription you need and the lifestyle you lead.

It is this complexity of need and design that requires the additional skills of a contact lens practitioner or fitter. Contact lens wearers form a real bond with their professional because of the greater need for consultation than with specs. Technology in new materials is forever changing and improving bringing the successful wearing of contacts to more and more people. Unlike spectacle wearers who display their specs with pride, contact lenswearers wear them in cognito and rarely mention that they are successful wearers. In 2005, 3.3 million people wore contacts which is around 10% of those needing visual correction. This is a far lower figure than in the States and in some Northern European countries.

There have been some dramatic changes to the industry over recent times, not least the ability to buy lenses over the internet from reputable suppliers with a legal in-date prescription, new technology allowing more sophisticated and better designed lenses to be made more cheaply, and new lens surface coatings providing cleaner, clearer and more comfortable lenses to wear. We aim at Mylocaloptician.co.uk to set out the different possibilities available to you and simplify your decision making. However, only those legally qualified to fit contact lenses can offer you the final best option given that each pair of eyes has its own special characteristics.
As well as choosing on price, choose your optician on easy access so you don’t have to take time off work for check-ups (which are very important), and select a practitioner you can get on with and trust in.

So click on our pages on wearing regimes and types of lenses and you will start to see how there is a balance to be made between choosing the simpler designed and cheaper made lenses which can be replaced more often against the better more complex lenses made with superior materials which are generally changed less often.