Blue Contact Lenses Guide

In the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, young Dorothy Gale asks a beautician in The Emerald City, "Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?" The beautician replies that she can and Dorothy's brown eyes are dyed to match her blue gingham dress. These days you don't have to be a guest of the Wizard of Oz to turn your brown eyes blue.

Blue contact lenses are extremely popular and widely available in a variety of shades and types. They can meet many corrective requirements, from near-sightedness, to far-sightedness, to astigmatism. So if you're ready to give blue contact lenses a try, the right choice for you is surely out there.

The Basics
Colored contact lenses come in three types and blue contact lenses are no exception. The three types are visibility tint, enhancement tint, and color tint.

Visibility tint means that the entire contact lens is lightly tinted in either blue or green so that you can see the lens better if you drop it, or when you are placing it in your case. This type of lens will not change your eye color, or if it does, it will be such a slight difference that you won't really notice.

An enhancement tint has a solid but translucent tint that covers the colored part of your eye called the iris. Enhancement tints will certainly change the color of your eye, but, as the name implies, this type of lens is intended to enhance your natural eye color, and will work better if your eyes are a light color.

Color tint lenses, also known as opaques, are darker opaque tints that are intended to completely change the color of your eye. Because the colored portion of a color tinted lens is opaque, or non-transparent, the center portion which covers your pupil is clear.

Since you are probably looking to actually change your eye color, our focus here will be on enhancement tints and color tints.

More About Enhancement Tints and Color Tints
As mentioned before, an enhancement tint will change the color of your eye and is intended to intensify your natural eye color. This type of lens would be ideal for a person who has blue eyes naturally, but wants to brighten the natural shade with blue contact lenses. Enhancement tints also work if you have pale green or hazel eyes but may give your eyes a kind of blue-gray or blue-green shade, rather than a pure blue. This type of lens will look quite natural because its transparency allows the interesting shade variations and unique shapes of your own iris to show through.

The manufacturers of opaque colored contact lenses, or color tints, have gotten pretty good at mimicking the patterns and color variation of a natural iris. If you study your iris closely, you will see that it does not have a flat, one-dimensional appearance. It has many dimensions with lines radiating from the pupil, cool shapes, and color variations. For this reason, opaque contact lenses will often have a series of small dots or a zig-zag pattern of variable color shades to make it appear more natural on the eye. Opaque blue contact lenses will work well on pale and dark eyes alike.

Because the process of tinting blue contact lenses increases manufacturing costs, both enhancement tints and color tints will cost a bit more than clear contact lenses.