Before touching your contact lenses always wash your hands, ensuring you rinse all the soap off and dry your hands on a lint free towel.
Do not apply make-up until after your lenses are inserted. Also your finger nails should be kept short and smooth so that you don’t nick the contact lens or scratch your eye.
First of all remove the contact lens from its case, rinse with saline and place a drop of wetting solution in the inside of the lens, then position yourself in front of a suitable mirror .
Use the middle, long finger from each hand to hold the eye lids back, using the end of the finger to hold the lid margin just behind the lashes.
Tilt the head so that when looking at yourself in the mirror, you can see the white of the eye above and below coloured part of the eye. This ensures the gap between the lids is wide enough for the lens to fit through. There is no point in trying to put the lens in if this is not the case.
Make sure your finger is not too wet or the lens will remain stuck to you finger when you try to insert it.
Keeping your chin depressed, so that the coloured part of the eye remains central between the lids, and keeping both eyes open and the fellow eye looking straight at itself, slowly bring the index finger ever closer to the cornea, until you feel it touch your eye.
To re-centre a displaced lens, first look away from its location, then push 2 fingers onto the lids to block its return path, and look back. The lens will then float onto the cornea.
The lens is removed by holding the lid margin against the white of the eye above and below the cornea. Keeping pressure on the lid margin, slowly bring the lids together while looking straight ahead. The lens will normally unhitch from the eye, usually at the top, allowing it to be removed from the lower eyelid.
If the lens ever becomes displaced off the cornea onto the white of the eye it needs to be gently moved with the eyelids back into position on the cornea. To do this, the technique is to look away from the position where the lens is located. This brings the lens into the straight ahead position. The index and long finger are placed on the eyelids over the original location of the lens. Next you need to look back towards the place the lens was sitting originally. As the eye moves, the cornea moves under the lens, which then is correctly placed once again. Often it helps to instill a drop of Theratears eye drops first if the eye is a bit dry before trying this procedure.
