The vast majority of people requiring vision correction can wear contact lenses without any problems. New materials and lens care technologies have made today's contacts more comfortable, safer and easier to wear. Consider the questions and answers below to help assess whether they're a choice you should consider.

• If your eyes are severely irritated by allergies;
• If you work in an environment with lots of dust and chemicals;
• If you have an overactive thyroid, uncontrolled diabetes, or severe arthritis in your hands;
• If your eyes are overly dry because of an eye condtion, pregnancy or medications you take.

• Many wearers feel that contact lenses show their eyes in a better light or don't like the appearance of eyeglasses.
• Better vision correction due to the reduced obstruction from eyeglass frames.
• Contacts provide excellent peripheral vision.
• No fogging up in warm rooms.
• Less hassle as contacts do not get in your way during dancing, sports and other recreational activities.

• Contact lenses require getting used to. New soft lens wearers typically adjust to their lenses within a week. Rigid lenses generally require a somewhat longer adjustment period.
• Except for some disposable varieties, almost all lenses require regular cleaning and disinfection, a process that, although requiring only a few minutes, is more than some people want to undertake.
• Some types of lenses increase your eyes' sensitivity to light.

• If you are involved in sports and recreational activities, contact lenses offer a number of advantages. In addition to providing good peripheral vision, eliminating the problem of fogged or rain splattered lenses, and freeing you from worries about broken glasses, contact lenses also mean you can wear non-prescription protective eye wear.
• Looking sideways through the lenses of glasses leads to prismatic effects because you are not looking through their centers. Your eyes have to coordinate differently to cope with this.  This does not happen with contact lenses because you always look through the centers of the lenses as they move with your eye movements.
• Your occupation and work environment should also be taken into consideration. If your work requires good peripheral vision, you may want to consider contacts. If you work in dusty environments or where chemicals are in heavy use, you might find glasses more comfortable.
• Do you like wearing glasses?
• Do you like the way glasses feel?
• Do you like how you look in glasses?

No longer is it really necessary to choose between either contacts or glasses. Some of today's contacts are so easy to wear that you can use them intermittently -- for special occasions, while participating in sports or to match your fashions.

Contact lenses are designed to rest on your cornea, the clear outer surface of the eye. They are held in place mainly by adhering to the tear film that covers the front of the eye and, to a lesser extent, by pressure from the eyelids. As your eyelid blinks, it glides over the surface of the contact lens and causes it to move slightly. This movement allows tears to provide necessary lubrication to the cornea and helps flush away debris between the cornea and the contact lens.

Contact lenses are optical medical devices, primarily used to correct nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism and presbyopia. In these conditions, light is not focused properly on the retina, the layer of nerve endings in the back of the eye that converts light to electrochemical impulses. When light is not focused properly on the retina, the result is blurred or imperfect vision.

When in place on your cornea, contacts function as the initial optical element of the eye. The optics of the contact lens combine with the optics of the eye to properly focus light on the retina. The result is clear vision.