Disposable contacts are worn for a specific period of time, then thrown out and replaced with fresh lenses. Disposables have become the most common type of contact lenses.

Many eye care practitioners and consumers prefer disposable contacts for their health and convenience benefits.

What Are Disposable Contact Lenses?
You need to understand the terminology:

Disposable lenses = replaced every two weeks, or sooner
Frequent replacement lenses = replaced monthly or quarterly
Traditional (reusable) lenses = replaced every six months or longer
The term "disposable" often refers to both disposable and frequent replacement lenses.

Replacement Schedule vs. Wearing Schedule
A common source of confusion about contact lenses involves replacement and removal intervals:

Replacement schedule refers to how often your lenses are discarded and replaced — that is, whether they are disposable, frequent replacement or reusable.
Wearing schedule refers to how long you wear your contacts before removing them. Daily wear means you wear contacts only during the day and remove them each night. Extended wear means you wear them continually for two or more days, including during sleep.
Disposable contacts can be prescribed either for daily wear or extended wear, depending on your eye physiology and needs.

Why Throw Out Lenses at All?
The more frequently you replace your contact lenses, the healthier and more comfortable your eyes can be.

Protein, calcium, lipids and other substances found naturally in your tears can build up on your lenses. These deposits make your contacts less comfortable than when they were new, and can also make your eyes more prone to infection.

Of course, lenses can be cleaned, but cleaning is not 100 percent effective. Some deposits will remain and increase over time.

Daily Disposables: The Ultimate in
Convenience and Health
There are two ways to avoid just about all contact lens care. One is to wear extended wear lenses continuously for several days, and then discard them when you remove them. Unfortunately, overnight wear of contact lenses is not a good idea for everyone, and wearing contact lenses during sleep may increase your risk of eye problems.

The other alternative is daily disposables, also called one-day disposables: contacts that you discard every night and replace in the morning with new ones.

Many eye care professionals and contact lens wearers feel that daily disposable contacts offer the best of both worlds: They are convenient because no lens cleaning is required and they are healthy because there is no day-to-day accumulation of lens deposits. Also, because these lenses are not worn overnight, you potentially have less risk of contact lens-related eye problems.


Are you following your eye doctor's cleaning instructions? If not, you might be better off with daily disposables.How Different Are Disposables from Regular Lenses?
Even before the advent of disposable lenses, it was well known that frequent lens replacement was a healthy thing to do. Problem was, contacts were too expensive to discard very often — so various cleaning solutions and devices were used to prolong the life of the lens.

Then contact lens manufacturers developed new manufacturing methods to produce high-quality lenses in greater volume, at lower cost. These advances led to lower lens prices, making it affordable to replace lenses more often. Some of today's disposable lenses are made of the same materials as traditional lenses; other disposables are made from new materials developed especially for disposability.

How Much Do Disposable Contacts Cost?
The cost of being fitted with contact lenses varies widely, depending on where you live, the eye care practitioner you choose, and how complicated your prescription is. The incremental cost of choosing disposable contacts over traditional contact lenses is slight, and is somewhat offset by the reduced need for cleaning products.

Even daily disposable lenses are more affordable than many people expect. For about $1 per day, you can wear daily disposables. Also, with daily disposables you'll eliminate the cost of lens cleaning products.

Can I Wear Disposables?
Yes, you probably can. An eye care practitioner can tell you for sure. The key is whether your particular prescription is available as a disposable lens. Today there is quite a selection of disposable and frequent replacement contacts, including colored contacts that change your eye color, others that correct for astigmatism, and bifocal disposable contacts.

If your prescription is less common, you might not be able to get disposable lenses, but frequent replacement lenses might be available to you. For an unusual prescription or specialty product, you may need to wear traditional lenses. Your eye care practitioner can offer you advice on this. The good news: If you wear traditional lenses, contact lens care is easier than ever before.

Which Replacement Schedule Is Right for Me?
This has more to do with your eyes than with the lenses themselves.

Sure, certain lenses are made to be replaced at certain intervals. But your frequency of replacement depends more on how your eyes behave while wearing lenses.

Some people's eyes produce more protein and lipids than others, and their lenses may need to be replaced more often. And if you have allergies, you might find that your lenses need to be replaced often, especially during peak allergy seasons.

A thorough evaluation by an eye care professional can help determine the best wearing schedule and replacement schedule for you.

Colored contact lenses come in three kinds: visibility tints, enhancement tints and opaque color tints.

Many of these colored contact lenses are available in plano form, as well as in designs for people who have astigmatism, need bifocals or want a disposable contact lens.

A visibility tint is usually a light blue or green tint added to a lens, just to help you see it better during insertion and removal, or if you drop it. Since it's a very light tint, it does not affect your eye color.

An enhancement tint is a solid but translucent (see-through) tint that is a little darker than a visibility tint. An enhancement tint does change your eye color. As the name implies, it's meant to enhance the existing color of your eyes. These types of tints are usually best for people who have light colored eyes and want to make their eye color more intense.

Color tints are deeper, opaque tints that can change your eye color completely. Usually they are made of patterns of solid colors. If you have dark eyes, you'll need this type of color contact lens to change your eye color. Color contacts come in a wide variety of colors, including hazel, green, blue, violet, amethyst and gray.

The companies that make colored contact lenses have gone all out to mimic the natural look of the colored portion of the eye, called the iris. Since this area is made up of colorful shapes and lines, some color contacts feature a series of tiny colored dots on the lens to make them look more natural on the eye.

But the center of the lens, the part that lies over your pupil, is clear so you can see.

Costume or theatrical contact lenses also fall into the category of opaque color tints. Long used in the movies (examples are The Man Who Fell to Earth and Twilight), these special-effect contact lenses are now widely available for novelty use and can temporarily transform the wearer into an alien or jaguar, among others.

Some Disadvantages of Color Contact Lenses
Although there are different sized lenses to fit most wearers, there will be some occasions (such as during blinking) where the colored portion may slide somewhat over the pupil.

Also, the size of your pupil is constantly changing to accommodate varying light conditions — so sometimes, like at night, your pupil may be larger than the clear center of the lens. In these instances, your vision may be slightly affected.

If you have a persistent problem with your contacts, it's important to see your eye doctor.

Sharing Contacts: A Bad Idea
While color contacts can be fun, doctors warn wearers not to share their colored lenses — or any contact lenses, for that matter — with friends, and not to swap colors with friends.

Contact lenses are medical devices and are fitted to the specifications of each individual's eyes. Exchanging lenses can also transmit harmful bacteria, which can lead to an eye infection or other potentially dangerous eye conditions.

Color contacts, like clear contact lenses, must be properly cleaned and disinfected with appropriate cleaning products. Ask your doctor which cleaning products are best for your particular lenses.

Do You Need a Prescription for Colored Contact Lenses?
Yes, under U.S. law you need a contact lens prescription. This is true even for "plano" lenses that don't have prescriptive power.

In November 2005, President George W. Bush signed into law Public Law 109-96 (sometimes referred to as the Plano Contact Lens Law), which classifies all contact lenses — including color contact lenses and prosthetic contact lenses that do not contain any power to correct vision problems — as medical devices under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Among other things, this classification demands that all contact lenses, worn for any purpose, require a valid contact lens prescription written by an eye doctor and cannot be sold to consumers without one.

If you see color contact lenses being sold in a flea market, it is likely that the vendors are breaking the law. Recently flea market vendors in Jacksonville, Fla., were warned to stop selling color contact lenses and were, pending investigation, subject to being charged with a misdemeanor for selling them without a state license.

Other illegal sales of cosmetic contact lenses have been discovered in gas stations, beauty salons and novelty shops.