When you begin to lose your eyesight, which occurs to most of us at around the age of forty, you have two basic choices: glasses or contact lenses. Both contact lenses and spectacles have their advantages and disadvantages, so whichever you select is certainly a personal decision. However, some people have ‘dry eyes’, which means that the tear ducts do not irrigate the eyes as much as standard.
If someone has dry eyes, then wearing specs will not exacerbate the condition, but if someone with dry eyes decides to wear contact lenses for personal reasons, the condition can make their lives very uncomfortable.
People who wear contacts but have dry eyes will probably experience a discomfort that will lead to the person rubbing their eyes, which will make the situation worse.
There might be medical reasons for the lacrimal ducts not producing enough moisture to lubricate the eyes, but age can be a factor. If you have itchy eyes and are over sixty, it might be in your interests to change from contacts to spectacles.
Some people find it a very hard decision to take. TV personalities and film stars seldom like to be photographed wearing specs. All right, there are not too many of them, but there are hundreds of millions of individuals who look up to their screen idols and copy them blindly.
One of the causes of dry eyes, besides age or personal illness, is environmental conditions. Pollution affects different people in different ways, but tobacco smoke affects most peoples’ eyes, to say nothing of their lungs.
Evaporation is another cause of dry eyes. This sounds strange, because you would imagine that the water trapped between the eyes and the lenses could not evaporate, but a lot of contact lenses are composed of fifty percent water to make them more supple and therefore more comfortable.
A hot environment will evaporate water from the lenses and the lenses will endeavor to replenish themselves by sucking water off your eyes – a form of osmosis. This is a good reason for soaking your contact lenses in a solution during the night. The solution is there to sterilize the lenses, but it will also allow the lenses to ‘hydrate’ again.
Therefore, a possible solution to the problem of dry eyes, if evaporation is your problem, is to replace your lenses half way through the day. another way of combatting dry eyes if you want to wear contacts, is to put drops in your eyes every hour.
You can buy these drops from a chemist in small containers or you can purchase a litre of the solution and refill your droppers yourself. However, a saline solution (salt and water) is just as effective as anything and a lot cheaper.
If none of this works for you then why not merely switch to glasses? The trend is to be more open about oneself and part of this trend is to admit your age, wear your wig openly, if that is what you do and be| seen wearing your glasses.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a number of topics, but is now concerned with Designer Spectacles. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Spectacles Direct.