Contact Lenses

Hand Painted Contact Lenses

You might think you can remember when contact lenses were created. Just take a guess, and I’ll bet you’re guessing sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. Well, contact lenses go back a lot further than people might remember. The idea of an alternative to glasses was first proposed more than 200 years ago by eye practitioners in Europe. Some contact lenses were actually used back then, too!

They were crafted out of glass and polished. They performed refraction adjustments to eyes rather well, but the problem was they were large, pretty uncomfortable and very heavy on your eyes. Since no one could be really coerced into buying glass objects that are heavy and can be placed inside your eyelids, the idea really went away until about 150 years later, when in 1936, the Rohm and Haas Company unveiled its contact lens made out of polymethylmethacrylate, which is a plastic that had the advantages of being lightweight, precise in refractions, and was caused less irritability to eyes than its predecessors.

Cat Eye Contact Lenses

When this company came out with these contact lenses, some of the wealthier members of society started trying them out. During the 1940s and 1950s, these plastic contacts would dominate the contact lens market. The main problem, however, with these contact lenses was that they couldn’t be worn very long, because the sections of the eyes that were covered by the lenses were cut off from getting air. And when your cornea has a reduced level of oxygen, the center of your corneas begin to swell and the surface will develop water blisters in anywhere from one to three hours time.

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In 1946 a lighter, smaller and thinner corneal contact lens was created by Kevin Tuohy. Tuohy’s lens covered less of the area of your, so you could wear them for even longer periods of time with even more comfort. Then in 1957, a European man created the first, soft, flexible hydrogel contact lens. These were much more comfortable, as soft contact lenses can be bent or folded. Hydrogel lenses have water caught in them to allow for oxygen to pass through.

Then in 1971, the gas-permeable contact lens was created by a man named Norman Gaylord. These silicone contacts drastically improved how well contact lenses could breathe. Bausch & Lomb picked up the contact lenses and started to market them on a wide scale.