Color contact lenses could be used to enhance or change people’s eye colors. They could be cheap or expensive: A FreshLook Dimensions Contact Lenses could be sold at $40 online. Acuvue, Europa, Bella, and Precision UV priced their Plano, bifocal, toric, or disposable contact lenses at up from $19.9 online.
But colored contact lenses have their disadvantage – sometimes it might slightly affect people’s vision. A new research from a Singaporean team may have found a solution for that.
Types and Disadvantage of Colored Contact Lenses
Colored contact lenses cover the iris, the colored portion of the eyes, with three kinds of tints: visibility tints, enhancement tints or opaque color tints.
- A visibility tint is usually a light blue or green tint added to a lens. It does not affect people’s eye colors.
- An enhancement tint is solid but translucent. It does not change the eye colors, but enhance the existing eye colors.
- Color tints are opaque and can change people eye color completely.
But the center of the contact lens, the part over people’s pupil, is clear so people can see.
As the size of people’s pupil is constantly changing to accommodate varying light conditions, sometimes, like at night, the pupil may be larger than the clear center of the lens. In these instances, tints in the contact lenses may partly cover people's vision.
Improvement of Colored Contact Lenses
The Singapore-based Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) may have found a solution to improve the performance of colored contact lenses. They made a new-style contact lenses from transition lenses, glass embedded with photochromic dyes that change shape when irradiated by light. When light is strong, the dyes spread and block out the light and darken the lens; when light is weak, the dyes recede and the lens is clear.
This technology is developed to make “sunglass” contact lenses, for the dye changes can block out the sun. The researchers said that their products react to sunlight and UV quickly. As the color transition contact lenses becoming more sensitive to other light changing, they will change their sizes of colored portions to accommodate pupil change due to varying light conditions. Better colored contact lenses could be expected in the near future.
As photochromic dyes can be any color, color transition contact lenses may be a very cool product combining the advantages of colored contact lenses and sunglass.
References:
- Contact Lenses That React to UV Developed, Optometry Today, 12 Nov 2009
- Color Contact Lenses, Nancy Del Pizzo
- First-Ever Transition Contact Lenses May Replace Sunglasses, Stuart Fox
Chen Nanyang - Chen Nanyang's journalist career began in 2002 when he started writing for China's Nanfang City News, Singapore's United Morning Post and ...
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