Color Transition Contact Lenses

Colored Contacts to be Cooler than Sunglasses

Colored contact lenses will be improved with new technology. It will be clear at night and block out sunlight at day.

Color contact lenses offering superior comfort can 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. 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 tints’ types: enhancement tints, visibility tints, or opaque color tints.

  • Visibility tints, most of the times are light green or blue tints that are added to the lens. These tints don’t affect people’s eye colors.
  • Enhancement tints are translucent but solid. These tints do not change the eye colors but are enhancing the existing eye colors.
  • A Color tint is opaque and can change the eye color of the people completely.

The contact lens center that is covering the pupils, is completely clear so people can see.

Pupil’s size is changing constantly so it can accommodate to the changing lights, for example at night, the size of the pupil can be larger than the lens’ clear center. 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 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 for enhancing eyes’ beauty 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.