Dangerous Contact Lens Mistakes You Don't Know You're Making

When you first started using contact lenses, chances are you had the best intentions and were vigilant about keeping your lenses clean and properly cared for. 

But eventually, you started to slack off. Maybe you fell into the habit of taking out your lenses without washing your hands. Or maybe you started going to sleep without removing them first. Sound familiar? 

These scenarios may seem fairly harmless, but they could have more serious consequences than you realized. 

The majority of contact lens users don’t use proper hygiene and that puts them at risk of eye infections, including inflammation of the cornea called keratitis. 

One type of keratitis, called microbial keratitis, can occur when bacteria, viruses and even amebae invade the cornea. 

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Research shows that each year there are 930,000 doctor’s office and outpatient clinic visits, as well as 58,000 emergency department visits, for keratitis or contact lens disorders. In severe cases, keratitis can lead to blindness or the need for corneal transplant.

Talk about an eye-opener. To raise awareness about the risks of not properly caring for your contacts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is declaring this Contact Lens Health Week. 

Here’s a look at what you’re doing wrong when it comes to contact lenses — and what you should do instead.

You clean your lenses or case with water. “A lot of people are not aware that you’re not able to wash contact lenses in water,” Vivian Phan, senior optometrist at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute, told Yahoo Health. In fact, water can cause soft contact lenses to change shape, swell and stick to the eye, according to the CDC. 

This can lead to the contact lens scratching the cornea, giving germs easy access to your eye where they can cause an infection. 

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Contact lenses should also never be worn while swimming, showering or in a hot tub, and cases should never be washed in water. 

“You should clean out your case with fresh contact lens solution, wipe it out and let it dry completely, upside-down,” says Phan.

You top off the old solution in your lens case with new solution. You may think there’s no harm in adding some new contact lens solution to the old solution in your lens case, but you’d be wrong. 

“This causes the disinfectant to lose its effectiveness,” Elmer Tu, M.D., spokesperson for the American Academy for Ophthalmology and professor of clinical ophthalmology at University of Illinois at Chicago, told Yahoo Health. “Change the solution every day,” he says.

You don’t clean out your lens case after each use. Every single time you use your contact lens case, you need to rinse it out with fresh solution and let it dry, notes Phan. Is it a hassle? Sure. 

But “otherwise, a little layer will build up on bottom called biofilm,” explains Phan — and that could put your eyes at risk for infection.