Daily, Fortnightly or Monthly Contact Lenses?

So you’re about to start buying contact lenses? Or, maybe you have been using contacts for a while and are wondering if you are using the best type for you. Well here’s a few things to think about. Firstly let’s just put Monthly and Fortnightly lenses in the same category. We could’ve called this blog post “Reusing Contact Lenses or Not…” or something –  which might have made more sense. But basically daily contact lenses are designed to be thrown away every day and monthly and fortnightly aren’t. Actually both of the lenses do the same things – you know; they help you see better, allow you a bit more freedom and they aren’t noticeable like glasses. Firstly you are probably wondering why you can’t just wear daily contacts for days on end (even if you take them out overnight). It’s the materials. Daily contact lenses are built with a cheaper material that won’t last the distance. Reusable contact lenses used to be the only option but over time manufacturers realised that there were advantages to be had by disposing of the lens every day. So they created products that were cheap (yet still comfortable) so people could afford to throw the lens away each day. Ok, so what are the advantages of daily lenses or reusable lenses? Daily contacts are ‘healthier’. How much healthier they are is hard to tell, but the theory makes sense. That is, if you dispose of your contacts every day, you are also disposing of all the grime, dust and what have you. You’re not likely to be able to get your reusable lenses as clean as they were at the start of the day before just by rubbing them in solution and storing them overnight, build up will happen. For that reason Fortnightly lenses are better than Monthly lenses too. Convenience has its place. Don’t muck around with contact solutions at night and cleaning the lenses, just chuck it out and grab a new lens in the morning. Yes, and by now you’re wondering what is the advantage of monthly lenses. Well, we touched on it further up, but price is really the most obvious one. Reusable lenses tend to be cheaper per day than dailies. But are daily or monthlies suitable for me? Well some prescriptions just simply aren’t available as daily lenses but that would be a very minority group of prescriptions. If I were you, I’d try both dailies and monthlies first, just get a feel for either and you’ll probably soon be able to figure out for yourself which are the best.