Tuesday 3 November 2015

Don't dispose of the disposable!



I have just received my new contact lenses in the mail. I find it funny they're called "Lacrima", which in Italian means "teardrop". It makes the whole process of putting on contacts quite emotional. I buy the monthly disposable ones - you use them for a month, then chuck it away and get a new pair on.



But I have come to realise I keep a pair for much longer than the expected 30 days. I think I go, on average, for two months. Yesterday I made some calculations about this very pair I'm wearing (using some mildly unreliable criteria: for example, trying to remember what day was it when the Jehovah's witnesses came to my house - exactly when I was opening the new box of contacts), and realised I might have been wearing them since June. As we are in November, that's quite a performance- and I can still see things well :)

Is it bad to wear monthly disposable contacts for 5 months? They do feel sticky after a while, which is what prompts me to start looking for new ones - but sometimes that strangely happens for a couple of days only. I did some research online, just to find out that the majority of users (at least those who can be bothered writing about it online) are pretty relaxed too, changing them every 2 or 3 months.

Moneywise, 3 months of disposable lenses cost me 56 bucks. That means, $224 a year - over ten years, taking inflation into account, it's around $2500. So if I stick to my 3 months approach, I save some $800 dollars in ten years- 80bucks per year. It doesn't really turn me into a billionaire.

As usual, the DailyMail has a well-balanced article on the issue.

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