Contact lenses have come a long way since the late 1800s, when the earliest models were made from blown glass. New contact lens technology is constantly being developed, resulting in more comfortable, safe, and effective lenses made from better materials. Check out a few of the top new ways manufacturers are improving contacts.
Flat Packaging Is More Convenient and Safer
The new Miru 1day contact lenses from Menicon offer new technology in packaging—and it's a more significant advance than it might initially seem. The Miru 1day lenses come in a flat package less than 0.04 inches thick, easy to carry anywhere—stick a couple in your wallet and you'll never be caught without lenses again. More importantly, the packaging holds the lens in the correct position every time, meaning you're unlikely to accidentally touch the side that makes contact with your eye and introduce oil, bacteria, or other impurities to the underside of the lens.
The Miru 1day also features new contact lens technology aside from the packaging: the edge of the lens tapers down to a very slim profile, allowing it to slide easily under the eyelid with minimal friction compared to the thicker edges found on more traditional lenses.
Wettability Means Comfort
As odd as it sounds, wettability (or wetting) is a real attribute of solid materials, describing how well liquids stay on the surface. Think of a towel, which has high wettability, compared to a good raincoat, which has low wettability. For contact lenses, higher wettability means more comfort—the lenses start wetter and retain the water better, preventing them from drying out. While treatments for other products are often designed to decrease wettability, in recent decades contact lens material technology has been focusing on increasing wettability.
CooperVision's Proclear lenses are at the cutting edge of wettability technology. The Proclear technology forms hydrogen bonds with water molecules, incorporating them into the material securely. This "imitates substances found naturally on the outside of every human eye cell," according to CooperVision, which means more comfort all day long.
UV Blocking Protects Your Eyes
Ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun slowly but steadily contributes to vision degradation through cataracts and other eye damage. Just as good sunglasses protect your eyes from UV light, now so do certain contact lenses. Acuvue has achieved extraordinarily high UV protection in their OASYS lenses—96.1 percent of UV-A and 100 percent of UV-B, compared with competitors, whose lenses block between 4 percent and 50 percent of UV-A or UV-B rays.
With many companies constantly developing new contact lens technology, the available products keep getting better. Hopefully, all of these ideas will soon be combined into one contact lens with all the best technology possible.
Related reading: Top 5 Contact Lens Myths
