How Often You Really Need to Replace Your Contact Lenses, and What Happens When They Expire

It's easy to take contact lenses for granted these days, especially in an age where laser correction surgery is widely available, but those transparent plastic discs you slip into each eye every morning are still a relatively new invention -- and still carry risks if you don't handle them correctly and replace them when needed. It wasn't until almost 1950 that the first modern plastic contact lens were introduced, and disposable contact lenses wouldn't hit the market until the '80s. As Dr. Robert Kinast puts it, "We think of contact lenses as being so normal, but 100 years ago, nobody walked around with little pieces of plastic over their eyes." Kinast, the vice chair of ophthalmology at Legacy Devers Eye Institute and co-founder of GentleDrop, says, "Contact lenses are foreign bodies and should be treated with respect." To that end, we talked with eye experts to learn how to care for contact lenses and when to replace them. How long do contacts last? The lifespan of your contact l ... Read full article.