Custom Soft Lenses

For a majority of people, standard soft contact lenses, the lenses that can be purchased at almost any retail glasses and contact lens provider’s office, work well. But for some people, these standard soft contact lenses are a poor fit. If these lenses do not work for you, your eye care provider can take you through the steps to find the best custom option. Custom soft contact lenses provide a special fit for eyes with complex or high prescriptions, need custom tinting or have a unique shape.

High Prescriptions and Bifocal Options

Standard soft contact lenses work well for the average prescription, but what if you have a high prescription or high astigmatism? Even if there is a standard soft contact lens that comes in your prescription, studies have shown that more complex prescriptions lead to higher rates of patients discontinuing contact lens wear, especially with astigmatism and multifocal prescriptions.1 Custom soft lenses can be designed for higher prescriptions, including astigmatism correction, from up to +/-30.00D of spherical correction and up to -12.00D of astigmatism correction, depending on the laboratory through which your eye care provider orders.

For people who wear bifocals, there are custom multifocal soft contact lenses that can be fit in a more specialized design compared to standard contact lenses. This allows your eye care provider to tailor the multifocal to your eyes and optimize vision at all distances (far, intermediate, and near), especially if standard multifocal soft contacts have not worked in the past.

Colored Contact Lenses

Whether you want to change the color of your eye to a unique or fun color, you experience glare or headaches from iris abnormalities, or if your eye color is dissimilar between both eyes – there are specialty colored contact lenses that your eye care provider can help fit for you.

Cosmetic contact lenses can be custom made to enhance your natural eye color or completely change the appearance of your eyes. Over-the-counter cosmetic lenses have complications, including eye infections that can lead to permanent vision loss.2 Your eye care provider can help fit you into custom colors that are safe and healthy for your eyes.

Custom colored contact lenses can also be designed to block light for people who are sensitive to glare due to eye conditions such as albinism or iris trauma. Additionally soft contacts can be customized to have a tint. Tints can be used to enhance vision for certain retinal conditions such as achromatopsia, improve light sensitivity, block blue light, and even help with migraines.3,4 Custom contact lenses can even be designed to match your eye color, which can be used when one eye is opaque from past injuries.

Irregular Eyes

Standard soft contact lenses are made to fit the average eye shape, which works for 77% of the population. That leaves 23% of people who cannot fit into the “typical” contact lens.5 Custom soft contact lenses can be designed to better fit the shape of your eye, especially for people with an irregular eye shape, such as keratoconus or other corneal ectasias, and small or large corneas. Custom soft contact lenses can provide comfort and ease of handling with good vision that can even be better than glasses, depending on the corneal condition.

Contributed by: Jaci Bongard, OD, FAAO

References

1. Pucker AD, Tichenor AA. A Review of Contact Lens Dropout. Clinical Optometry. 2020; 12:85-94.
2. Young GM, Young AG, Lakkis C. Review of Complications Associated with Contact Lenses from Unregulated Sources of Supply. Eye and Contact Lens: Science and Clinical Practice. 2014; 40:58-64.
3. Schornack MM, Brown WL, Siemsen DW. The use of Tinted Contact Lenses in the Management of Achromatopsia. Optometry – Journal of the American Optometric Association. 2007; 78:17-22
4. Harris P. Relieve Migraines with Tinted Lenses. Optometry Times. 2015; 7:30-31.
5. Caroline P, André M. The Effect of Corneal Diameter on Soft Lens Fitting, Part 1. Contact Lens Spectrum. 2002 April;17:56