CONTACT LENSES

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At Sercombe and Matheson, we think we're good at providing glasses that look good and feel great, but we also think that most glasses wearers would enjoy having contact lenses as well. Even if you love your specs, you'll still appreciate the excellent peripheral vision that you'll get with contact lenses and that they don't fog up or slide off when you exercise or get wet when it rains. For "contact" sports wearing contact lenses means you'll avoid damaging your glasses or having your glasses damage you.

Contact lenses come in a huge number of varieties and which variety is best for you depends on a number of factors.  Physical factors include the size and shape of your cornea, the strength of your prescription, the quality of your tear film and the health of the eye surface.  Other considerations are how often you want to wear your lenses, how much cleaning you want to do and how much you are prepared to spend.

On this page we discuss contact lenses under three headings- disposable lenses, long- life lenses and coloured lenses:

Disposable Lenses

IN 2009 over 90% of our contact lens fit involve some kind of disposable lens.These are lenses with a planned replacement schedule -a fresh pair after one day, two weeks or one month of wearing days. One day replacement means no cleaning, and the lenses are very thin so easy to adapt to very noticeable. Fortnightly and monthly replacement lenses are usually cleaned and disinfected after use but some kinds can be left in the eye during sleep (so-called extended wear), so there is no cleaning or removing lenses on a daily basis. Disposable lenses mean the wearer has a relatively clean lens that's in good condition most of the time and the individual cost of each lens is low so damaging or losing lenses isn't too expensive. Disposable lenses come in long and short-sighted and astigmatic prescriptions and also in bifocal, multifocal and tinted varieties.

The newest generation of disposable lenses are made from silicon hydrogel materials. The incorporation of silicon has improved the oxygen transmission of contact lenses dramatically - three to five times that of pre-existing lens materials.All of the sleep-in lenses (Focus Night'n'Day, Purevision and Purevision toric) are silicon hydrogels and this technology is now available to day-time-only wearers too. Acuvue Oasys, Biofinity, Airoptix and Avaira are also made from these materials. At Sercombe and Matheson we think that the wider availability of silicon hydrogel technologyis a good thing - all contact lens wearers can benefit from more oxygen reaching their eye surface. More oxygen means improved corneal health,  whiter eyes and more comfortable lenses.Silicon hydrogel generally means lower water content so lenses are less prone to drying out. In June 2009 the first one-day silicon hydrogel lens will be launched in New Zealand.

Long- Life Lenses

These are removed for sleep, require rigorous cleaning and are made either of  hard (rigid) or soft, (flexible) materials and are usually replaced every one to two years.Long-life contact lenses are mostly custom made and this is reflected in their cost and higher fitting fees. Rigid lenses take some persistence to adapt to but this is worthwhile for some astigmatic prescriptions, and for people with unusual shaped corneas.The vision quality with rigid lenses is generally excellent.

Soft conventional lenses have almost been completely superseded by disposable lenses, but for high prescriptions or unusually large or small lens eyes they can still be useful.They aren't available in as good a range of materials as disposable lenses, so if there's a choice, a disposable lens is a better option.

Coloured Lenses

These are available in both prescription and non prescription, although not in as wide a prescription range as non-tinted lenses. With these lenses you can change your eye colour to suit.