Eye Candies

What is the difference between Dual-Tone and Triple-Tone Colored Contact Lenses?

While both of these lenses will give you vivid natural-looking eye color, the 3-tone lenses have a 3rd lighter tone on the inner part of the lenses, which gives gives your eyes a more vibrant look and make them stand out more. This picture shows the difference!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but what if the beholder wants more beautiful eyes? Colored contact lenses have been steadily gaining popularity among those who want to add a little more pizzazz to their peepers.

Ciba Vision, a leading manufacturer of contact lenses, currently makes a dozen different styles of colored contact lenses. Some offer subtle changes, such as lenses that make blue eyes look bluer. Other, novelty lenses can change the eye’s appearance dramatically—turning the iris a blood-red color, for instance, or making it look like a cat’s eye.

The simplest colored lenses are enhancing lenses, which look like a regular contact lens with an iris-sized circle of transparent color. These lenses aren’t meant to hide the iris’s natural color, but rather to augment it. It’s not meant to make a brown eye blue, but to make a blue eye bluer. Ciba Vision creates the color by covalently attaching organic azo dyes to the contact lens polymer.

Making a more substantial change to the iris’s natural color—like making a brown eye look blue—calls for opaque pigments,

The unusual and obviously fake look of early colored contact lenses turned off a lot of customers.

Colored contact makers have gotten better at making dramatic yet realistic-looking changes to the appearance of the iris. Ciba Vision uses sophisticated designs of opaque inorganic pigments to create this type of lens.

Researchers pored over pictures of eyes to identify the features that are common to beautiful eyes. They found that the irises considered most beautiful usually have a dark outer ring, an inner band of color, and a small golden starburst near the pupil.

Ciba Vision’s FreshLook ColorBlends lenses combine these three features but also have small, uncolored spaces where the iris’s natural color shows through. This, gives the lens a more natural appearance.

Nano- and microscale particles of inorganic pigments such as titanium dioxide, iron oxide, and barium sulfate are typically used to achieve the opaque color in these lenses. For certain brands, Ciba Vision adds mica to achieve a pearlescent look.

Lens makers hope that the more natural-looking lenses will make consumers as comfortable with changing their eye color as they are with changing their hair color.

Beauty is in the eye of the consumer.