Contact lenses companies seem to release new products each year, and I’m usually skeptical about their claims of year-over-year improvements. However, if you’re at all like me when it comes to eye care, you rely heavily on the recommendations of your optometrist. And when my optometrist describes a new product as potentially “more comfortable” or “better for your eyes,” I am going to tend to try it.
For the past two years, I’ve worn Ciba Vision’s Focus Dailies single-use, daily-disposable lenses, and my optometrist just recommended I try Johnson & Johnson Vision Care’s new, 1-Day Acuvue Moist lenses. I’ve worn soft, daily disposable lenses for a few years now, for convenience (to eliminate the need for cleaning and storage) and safety (from minimal contamination from handling and protein buildup). For a week, at my optometrist’s design, I wore an Acuvue lense in one eye and a Ciba Vision lense in the other.
I have mixed judgments on the 1-Day Acuvue Moist lenses.
The new 1-Day Acuvue Moist lenses do work well with regard to the one attribute that matters most to me: comfort. They are, indeed, more comfortable than my existing Focus Dailies, although my optometrist estimated that around 50% of his patients perceive them as an improvement over other lenses and the other 50% detect no difference. By “comfortable,” I mean two things: (1) the Ciba lense was more palpably more noticeable in my eye and more irritable if dust were beneath it — relative to the Acuvue lense and (2) the Acuvue lense was noticeably less dry at night.
However — and this is a bit difficult to describe — although the 1-Day Acuvue Moist lenses are less noticeable in the eye and dry out less towards the end of the day, I am experiencing the sensation that my eyes are getting slightly less oxygen throughout the day. I’m speculating that this perception is because the Acuvue lenses are 58% water content, whereas the Focus Dailies are 69% water content. Two other drawbacks are (1) delicacy and (2) cost.
Likely due to the technology that makes the lenses “moist,” the 1-Day Acuvue Moists collapse or fold more easily when handling (less rigid) than the Focus Dailies and are slightly more susceptible to dislodgement, for example, if you rub your eye.
Also, the cost is steep. A year supply of Ciba’s Focus Dailies costs $368. After a $200 rebate Ciba presently is offering and the $140 my Vision Service Plan covers, the next cost to me is just $28. The 1-Day Acuvue Moist lenses, new that they are, cost a whopping $638 for a year’s supply. After a rebate and the VSP contribution, the net cost to me $423. Frankly, my optometrist is charging usurious prices, and I expect a little research would reveal better deals online.
On balance, comfort is important enough to me and the increased overall comfort was enough that I’m making the switch from the Focus Dailies to the 1-Day Acuvue Moist lenses. To his credit, my optometrist left the decision to me and actually counseled against a switch unless I noticed a significant difference.
If all you’d like to know is my impression of the 1-Day Acuvue Moist lenses, stop reading here. If you’d like to learn a tad bit more about how these lenses work and about basic contact lense information, continue reading.
__________________________
You may know that contact lenses may be characterized on a number of different dimensions, including:
- Function (corrective, cosmetic, etc.)
- Construction Material (plexiglass or Lucite (”hard”), water-containing plastic (”soft”) or waterless plastic (”rigid gas permeable”)
- Wear time (typically daily or weekly)
- Frequency of replacement (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, yearly)
- Design (spherical or toric, etc.)
Here, we’re discussing corrective, soft, daily-wear, daily-replace lenses, despite arguments that rigid gas permeable lenses are better. For soft lenses, different manufacturer use different plastics, including, but not limited to: Lotrafilcon B, Nelfilcon A, Balafilcon A and Etafilcon A. The plastics are all gas-permeable and contain water.
The source of the increased comfort in the 1-Day Acuvue Moists is Acuvue’s unique and proprietary “LACREON™” technology that “permanently embeds a water-holding ingredient, similar to that found in natural tears, into the proven etafilcon A material.” In other word, the Acuvue Moist lenses permanently hold water around the lense (see below).
Ciba Vision, which introduced Focus Dailies in 1997 and was the market leader as recently as March 2006 (I’m too lazy to find current measures), employs a different technology: “AquaRelease.” The Ciba Vision Web site explains:
“New Focus DAILIES with AquaRelease provide time-release comfort. A moisturizer, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), is released slowly (through pumping and shearing action) from the lens into the tear film, where the PVA lubricates the lens to increase comfort (Figure 1). The distribution of AquaRelease begins to diminish at the end of the day, which helps ensure compliance with the recommended wearing schedule.”
Because my eyes tend to dry out towards the end of the day, the Acuvue Moists, with the persistent water embedding, has greater appeal to me than the time-release technology of the Focus Dailies.
Additional Resources:
Comments(0) 
