Can I leave my contact lenses without solution?
Contact lenses generally need to be kept soft and moist. During the day, it's usually enough to just have them in your eyes, but overnight, you're probably keeping them in solution. But sometimes, you either run out of solution or forget to bring it along when you're traveling. In that case, what do you do?
The importance of proper lens care
Contact lenses are like glasses that are in direct contact with your eyes. Because of this, they have to be some pretty sophisticated little pieces of engineering. You probably got an eye exam before your prescription was written, and you need to keep the lenses clean and soft to keep getting the most out of them. That means adopting a daily care routine, which includes cleaning and soaking overnight in contact solution.
How to care for your contact lenses
Everybody has their own routine for taking care of contact lenses. In general, here's what your routine should look like:
- Wash your hands before handling contact lenses.
- Grab a clean contact lens case (pick up a new one every 3 months or so) and fill it with fresh solution.
- Rub the first lens with cleaning solution to remove any debris or grit.
- Rinse the lens and drop it in the solution.
- Close the chamber and repeat with the other lens.
Rehydrating lenses
You might be able to rehydrate a dried-out set of lenses. If they're not visibly damaged, soak them in solution for 24 hours before trying them out. If they feel bad, take the lenses out and throw them away.
What does contact lens solution do for you?
Contact solution does a lot for your lenses. It's a good cleaning solution, which lets you rinse off the gunk that gets stuck to the lenses during the day. It cleans, disinfects, and generally un-gunk-ifies the lenses, which helps get them ready for use the next day. You definitely don't want the bacterial and fungal detritus that's floating in the air on your contact lenses, even just on general principle. Nightly soaking in solution also helps keep your lenses soft and pliable, which is a big deal for things you put in your eyes, you know?
What happens if you leave contact lenses without solution?
All kinds of bad things can happen if you don't use contact lens solution. In addition to germs and the stuff already mentioned, you could wind up with dry, warped, or torn lenses. Dry is bad all by itself, because ouch, but the other issues are actually more serious.
Contact lenses work the same way glasses do: by bending light a certain way based on their shape. Lenses that have warped without solution might not be able to bend the light the right way anymore, rendering them useless for vision correction. Torn lenses speak for themselves, as do fogged or clouded lenses, which reduce visibility and frankly defeat the purpose of having lenses at all.
If you ever wind up leaving your contact lenses out of their case or their cleaning solution, they could easily be a total loss. As a rule, you should toss out your contacts if they go more than half an hour outside your eyes or their case. If you have a super-convenient subscription for fresh contacts to be delivered to your home, it shouldn't be too much of a loss, and hopefully, you have a backup supply.
Keep your contact lenses fresh with the proper solution
Contact lenses have to stay moist and clean, which means daily soaking in clear solution. If you ever don't have solution when you need it, you're honestly better off disposing of the lenses and just putting in a fresh pair. If you ever need new lenses, you can get your prescription filled at a discount online, with these pretty cool coupons.
FAQs
Can you leave contacts in water/saline/random liquid instead of contact lens solution?
Contact lens solution is its own thing, and you really can't substitute anything else for it. Tap water has all sorts of stuff in it that's fine when it's going in your stomach, but notso-hotso for putting in your eyes. Pure saline will probably (mostly) clean the lenses, but unless it's proper solution, you're taking a real risk with objects going into your eyes in the morning.
Is it okay to reuse contact lens solution?
Officially, the answer to this is no, you should only use fresh contact solution every single time. Less officially, you can probably get away with reusing the stuff if it's not visibly contaminated or if you haven't done it too much. It's always a better idea to just use fresh solution, but in an emergency, you might be able to sneak a second use out of what you have.
How can you make homemade contact solution?
Please don't do this. Contact solution is a surprisingly complex formula, and you can't really whip up a substitute at home. Fortunately, unmedicated solution is pretty easy to pick up at the drugstore, and it's relatively shelf-stable, so you really shouldn't have to go without for long.