Yeyyy!!!! (I don’t know how to say hi without sounding repetitive). In my life as a short-sighted person, I’ve been lucky (I have to be optimistic in my blindness) to know how to take care of my eyes and my contact lenses way before starting cosplaying. Color contact lenses are so cool, almost everybody can wear them and they’re an essential cosplay accessory. As they’re a common element in our life, we sometimes forget about taking care of them correctly. Using them disgustingly, as I’ve sometimes seen, can cause us pink eye or worse diseases.
Taking care of our contacts means taking care of our eyes. The way we manipulate them and the time we wear them affects our precious eyes health. Colored contact lenses are the same as the transparent ones, they’re harmless if you use them right. Don’t think your life is in risk, but taking care of our contact lenses is a serious task we sometimes take lightly and we must remember health always comes first.
I’ve seen here and there tutorials on how to put in contacts for begginers, even forum posts with people asking (terrible). Well, if you’re an adventurous person who doesn’t mind having a red eye at the end of the day, you can try it at home. But, if you want to learn how to put them correctly, I highly recommend you to go to an optical store or to your ophtalmologist and ask them to teach you. It was really hard for me to learn how to put my contacts in as I found disgusting touching my eyes at that time. I was in my early teen years and I didn’t want to wear glasses, so I would have done anything to wear contacts. Now it’s just the opposite: I absolutely love wearing glasses.
Well, personal life apart, the first day I put in my contacts I had to wear them for a few hours for the optician to determine if everything was ok. I didn’t have any problem so, from that day on, I started wearing them.
Te question is there’s no one better than your optician to teach you put in your lenses. Don’t be shy and ask them!
Once you know you have no problem in wearing your contacts, you’ll have to take care of them. It’s very easy. Here you are some advice:
The moment you take them out of their bottle or blister, you must keep them in their case covered in contact lens solution. Don’t soak them in saline, neither in tap water. nooo!!!! And I’ve said covered, not smeared. I’ve seen some people sparing solution big time and that’s disgusting.
You may have read you can keep them in saline but that’s so very wrong! saline solution doesn’t contain desinfectant chemicals, it just keeps your lenses hydrated. You can use it possibly in an emergency case, but nothing more. Water cointains lots of bacteria (even mineral os distilled water). The only way you can keep and preserve your contact lenses correctly is covering them in their specific contact lens solution.
Speaking about liquids, don’t even think about licking them to lubricate them. Saliva has such a high amount of bacteria. You can get infected with Acathamoeba, an antibiotic resistant bacteria that causes acanthamoebic keratitis. This microbe is resistant to attack by the host inmune system and facilitates recurrence of the infection. This means it’s a hard to cure disease.
If you need to hydrate your lenses, use hydration drops.
Wash your hands every time you manipulate your contacts. Keeping a good hygiene will keep infections away.
If you find little spots on your contact lenses, don’t touch them with your filthy fingers, gently put them on the palm of your clean hand and pour a stream of lens solution to remove dirt.
Don’t wear them for more than 8-10 hours. Man, this is hard to accomplish (every cosplayer in the world have worn contacts all day long) but, everytime we’re able to, we have to take this in account. Wearing contact lenses reduce the ammount of oxygen that reaches our cornea and an insufficient oxygenation can damage it.
Put them in before putting your make up on and take them out before cleansing. We can drag make up spots from our eyelid to our eyes and we can do us harm if we cleanse our eyes before taking them out.
Don’t even think about wearing defective lenses with cracks. Any defect can injure our eyes. Throw it away ASAP!
If you put them in and you feel unconfortable, if you feel a prik, take them out. They may not be hydrated enough, maybe they have spots or maybe they’re low quality crappy lenses. I’ll talk later about good contact lenses stores.
It’s totally normal if you feel them inside your eyes, even more if you’re not used to wear them. Feeling pain is not normal at all.
Sometimes we can feel discomfort depending on the ventilation of the place we’re in. If you’re under air conditioning, your lenses will likely get a little dry. If this happens, you can use eye drops or hydration drops. These ones are a real panacea.
Check out their expiration date. They usually last one month, three months or one year. Their expiration date begins the moment you open the blister. This is a guideline really hard to achieve. Almost no one does it (not even me). As a cosplayer, having to throw away a pair of expensive lenses after using them a couple times is a pain in the ass.
Well, once they’re exposed to air from the first time, they start becoming deteriorated and they can harm our eyes if we use them longer than indicated. We’re all going to die blind.
If you’re keeping them for a long time, change the lens solution every so often. This solution tends to evaporate and looses its conservation power. It’s very important to change the case solution after using the lenses and it’s highly recommendable to change it every few days, even if we don’t wear the lenses, to keep the antiseptic effect.
If your lenses have dried up, you can rehydrate them with the lens solution. Keep them for some hours inmersed in this fluid and, if you check them and don’t see any crack, you can use them again.
I take this chance to mention a frequent question everybody has or has had regarding to wearing contacts: can contact lenses get lost in my eye? The answer is of course not! It’s really rare when the contact lens slip out of place because it fits the cornea shape (unless you have high astigmatism). One of my contacts once slipped out and got into my eyelid, but it came down quickly. It’s annoying, but bearable. I have astigmatism in my right eye and sometimes my contacts slightly move making me look cross-eyed. Disturbing.
Now that you know how to take care of them, let’s go shopping!! I obviously don’t know every contact lens store in the web, but I have a few favourite ones. If you specially like a store I haven’t mention here, feel free to mention it in the comments below.
– Funnylens:
Their contacs are amazing. They’re comfortable and I’ve never found a faulty one. It’s a german store, so if you order from Europe, they’ll arive home in less than a week. They have a wide portfolio full of beautiful lenses and they also sell prescription ones.
Just as the first store, their contacts are good quality, one of the most comfortable I’ve ever worn. They have lots of big eye lenses and more. From diameters to 14.00mm to sclera (the ones that cover the eye). Here you can find lots of prescription contacts.
My Maya contacts are from Pinky Paradise and I love them!
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| EOS Dolly Eye Grey from Pinky Paradise. |
– Eyesbright:
Here they have a little of everything. In this store you can fin natural looking contacts but the vast majority of them are not prescription.
My Morrigan contacts are the Twilight Werewolf from this store.
– Desio:
This is the cream of the crop of natural looking contacts. I must say I’ve never bought anything in this store, but I love their portfolio. I’ve watched some reviews, friends of mine have bought from there and they’re so amazingly beautiful and natural. They’re a little expesive, but they’re worth it. They also sell prescription lenses.
If you wanna freak out like crazy, check tis site out. They hand paint contact lenses. If you have the money and look for a very specific design, you can have it.
Optician’s shop: They usually sell natural colored lenses and some of them also sell crazy colors ones. You usually have to order your pair, so make sure you have time before the con!!
A very common problem we cosplayers have is we have a huge contact lens collection and we have to open each case everytime we look for a pair we want to wear. Well, to avoid this, you can buy a transparent lens case set. This way you can easily see what’s inside and how much liquid they have.
And that’s all for today! In summary: take care of your eyes! Cosplay is important, but health is way more. Buy quality products, keep you hygine and, if a pair of lenses you bought feel uncomfortable or cause you problems, don’t use it!
Hope this helped solving your doubts.
Thanks for reading!
