31 Jan
Blog

Glasses or Contacts: Which are better for helping your vision?

It’s possible nowadays to design your eye wear like you do your wardrobe – lots of different choices for lots of different occasions.

Some people choose the convenience of glasses; depending on your prescription, you can wear them only when driving, or reading, or whatever your vision care specialist advises. But you can have different ones with the same prescription, and tailor the frames to your winter, fall, spring and summer wardrobes. Different colors and styles can make you look serious, fun or fashionable; it’s all up to you these days.
Contact lenses are a smart choice, however, if you prefer not to be among those who are always asking, “has anybody seen my glasses?” It’s so easy to lose track of glasses, particularly those of us who only need them to read. Contacts, on the other hand, can be popped in first thing in the morning and worn all day, and you can even change your eye color, if you wish to. A reputable eye care specialist can help you choose the contacts that are right for you: soft, hard or disposable. What matters is that you choose your eye care products based on the counsel you receive from your eye doctor.
Contacts have come a long way; they aren’t just for the rich and famous anymore. A quality pair of lenses will last a long time if you treat them well; make sure they’re clean, and store them properly. And no one can tell if you’re wearing them, unlike glasses!
Disposable lenses are the right product for some, but not all folks. If you only need a prescription to read, the contacts might not be your best solution. Think of how often you glance at your phone, or read the daily newspaper! You won’t want lenses then, of course. That’s when reading glasses make sense.
But if, like most people, you struggle to see things at a distance, that means you’re near-sighted – yup, you can see things close by, but not far away – then contacts might be the ideal solution; you don’t have to worry about pulling out glasses from your purse or pocket. Either way, be sure to see a reputable, established eye care specialist, one who can help you with all your eye care needs and products!
31 Jan
Blog

How Colored Contact Lenses Work

Lots of people these days switch up their contact lens color, opting for blue one week, dark brown the next, and vivid green the following one.
Ever wonder how those lenses are made?
 
Mostly they are customized to the precise tint you want, but a little depends on the color of your natural eye. There are two types: translucent tinted lenses that are for light eyes only, and they come in a solid or clear tint. They may just enhance your natural color, or may change it quite dramatically.
Then there are opaque tints, which are solid tints made to mask the iris and change dark eyes. The tint is placed either within the lens, or on top of it. Imagine a doughnut with no hole, and you’ll get the idea.
Colored contacts used to be the sole territory of, say, actors with lots of extra cash to spend getting that azure shade of blue loved by casting agencies and film directors, but no more. Today they are available to just about anyone; they can be custom made for more reasons than just fashion and vanity. A “sport tint” can be added to reduce glare and increase depth perception. That means giving you, the wearer, a heightened advantage during your Sunday afternoon game of tennis.
The color is added only to a portion of the lens, so at some moments – like when you blink – the color portion might slide a little over the pupil. If the color is opaque, it can look a little odd when that happens. The key is getting your lenses from a reputable vision care specialist – that’s crucial. You want someone who can customize the color, size and prescription. No matter how temptingly low a price is you see offered by someone online, don’t bite: they probably aren’t the source you should turn to. You don’t want to cause problems with your vision by seeking out someone solely because they’ll give you a discount!
 
Colored contacts aren’t just for the rich and famous anymore, so see a vision care specialist and get some good advice on the pros and cons of wearing them. If Kanye West can get away with wearing stark blue lenses on the runway, you can wear whatever color you choose…you’re only limited by your imagination.
be sure to check out our current range of colored contact lenses and color changing eyedrops www.changemyeye.com
31 Jan
Blog

Blue Light, Is It Bad For Your Eyes?

Energy and wavelength play a large part in the place that visible light plays in the average person’s life. The average human eye has a high disposition to exposure to blue light. The average human eye is not very efficient at blocking blue light, which may lead to the formation of cataracts and other retinal diseases. Blue light mostly originates from LED light, computer monitors, and flat screen TV’s. In comparison to the light from the sun, the blue light from electronics is relatively insignificant. But blue light is the leading source of digital eyestrain. Digital eye strain is a common center of fatigue, and symptoms of fatigue. Keep in mind that blue light is the most common form transmitted by cellphones and is very toxic for the human eye. This may lead to dry and/or irritated eyes as well as discomfort. Keep in mind that blue light is the most common form transmitted by cellphones and is very toxic for the human eye.
Many experts are adamant in exploring the idea that blue light is far more beneficial than detrimental. The main argument being that blue light isn’t the direct cause of pre-mature blindness. Blue light may be an anchor that initiates basic human function, as the human body is so used to it. Blue light initiates parts of the brain that aren’t stimulated by any other type of light, the effect that blue light has on the brain is irreplaceable and serves as a great benefit to our life with the amount of technology we come into contact with.
31 Jan
Blog

Unlocking The Potential Behind Your Eyes

It is a well-known fact that human beings always judge based on certain physical characteristics. Most of these observations are things that they spot on another person when they first meet them. This would generally cause a first impression that might be positive or negative; nevertheless, the observer has already made up their mind.
 
Hence, it is important to always leave the best first impression when meeting new people. It has been proven that one of the first things that people look at is the other person’s eyes, and more specifically the eye color. This also includes its shape and the bags under your eye too! The eyes form an important part of any human being, as such your eye color has a huge impact on the first impression to the person in front of you. Your eye color becomes a huge part of your identity where it starts to affect you in all ways you might not even imagine. Having the right eye color can definitely get you places!
 
Imagine the confidence boost you would gain from having your favorite color as your eye color. This would give you a huge boost in your life that will affect you positively pushing you to the success you’re seeking.
Choosing the right eye color for the right time sounds like a thing we would hear 50-100 years from now, but that possibility is becoming a reality. Imagine being able to control all the outcomes in your business meetings or even in an important outing, blue eyes on an important date, and maybe green eyes at a business meeting?, due to the fact that green eyes establish trust & confidence. This is exactly what you can achieve by using colored contact lenses with different colors. Although www.changemyeye.com eyedrops are 98% of the way there in terms of changing your eye color, these changes take months not days, having something quick and easy is definitely where natural colored contact lenses shine through.
The eye is a very strong gift given to all of us, hence we should use it to help us shine. But lets just sit back and appreciate the fact you can create your own identity by picking the right color for the right time and understanding the strength of the eyes. Using it wisely can help you reach places you never thought possible.
31 Jan
Blog

Does eye color affect the way you are perceived?

Have you ever wondered whether your eye color could effect the way you are treated by others? Or how people perceive you?.
www.changemyeye.com decided to look into it further and here’s what we found.
There is a lot more to the human eye than just seeing. For example, research shows (white) blue-eyed children to be more behaviourally inhibited than their brown-eyed counterparts; among stuttering children, those with blue eyes are more severely dis-fluent in their speech; and there have been studies in the past which attempted to use eye-color as a medicinal prognostic factor. (Eye color has even been used to predict alcohol use).
Given the type of research results mentioned above you might not be surprised if I tell you now that a study – soon to appear in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences – has detected that men with brown eyes are perceived as significantly more dominant than their blue-eyed peers. However, there is more to the finding than …well…first reaches the eye:
For their study, a team of Czech researchers, took similar neutral, non-smiling profile pictures of 40 men and 40 women between 19 to 26 years of age. Then they asked a group of 62 raters -31 of them male – to judge the photographs for perceived dominance (as well as attractiveness) on a simple 10-point scale.
As mentioned already, brown-eyed males were perceived as more dominant, but it is what followed next, that is more interesting:
To better understand what was driving the observed effect, the researchers now used photo-editing software to change the eye color in all pictures from blue to brown and vice versa. After having done so, they repeated the experiment with a new group of raters, but – somewhat surprisingly – the original dominance ratings remained relatively unaffected. Although eye color was a highly significant predictor of perceived dominance in the first rating session, switching eye colors for all pictures did not significantly affect whose pictures were perceived as dominant and whose weren’t.
So what is happening here? Evidently – and additional morphological research by the same research team supports this – eye color correlates with other facial features that raters use to judge dominance. For example, brown-eyed men in the above study had broader chins, thicker eye-brows which are closer together, and larger noses; all of which may be viewed as the actual drivers of higher dominance ratings. But yet there is more to learn here, since we should still want to know how this link between eye color and dominance signalling features comes about:
Is it simply that there is a strong genetic link between features that signal dominance and eye color? Unlikely, say the authors
31 Jan
Blog

What does 20/20 Vision mean?

Have you ever heard the term ”20/20 vision” or the age old saying that hindsight is 20/20?.
Well, what does 20/20 vision mean? Let’s find out!

20/20 is basically defined as you can see at 20 feet what a “normal person” can see at 20 feet. 20/40 means you can see at 20 ft what a “normal person” would see at 40 ft.

If we get more in depth, 20/20 vision is actually talking about the resolution of the human eye, the 20/20 E famous on the snellen eye charts are actually very specifically sized such that each black line or white space in between is 1 arcmin of angle subtended from your eye. Therefore, resolving a 20/20 E lets you know that you can see 1 arcmin of resolution. 20/40 essentially means that the resolution you can see is 2 arcmin (smaller resolution is better).

In reality, our limit coming from the size of the rods and cones should be closer to 20/10.

Believe it or not, our eyes actually have quite a lot of optical aberrations, some (like astigmatism/defocus) which can be easily corrected with contacts or glasses, but others cannot. These difficult to correct aberrations can be known as higher order Aberrations (HOAs), which are usually relatively low compared to defocus and the larger lower order aberrations that can be corrected. For the most part, HOA really don’t affect our vision that much and lots are image processed out by your brain so you don’t really notice them, yet these with some parts of the uncorrected lower order aberrations make it so you are unable to reach 20/10 vision.

With an adaptive optics system, we are able to measure the wavefront aberration in your eye in real time and correct it with a deformable mirror which changes thousands of times a second to correct the wavefront. This effectively removes all the aberrations in your eye giving you almost perfect vision (~.01 microns rms) which enables people to see with 20/10 vision.

It is not called 100% vision because 100%, 90% ect vision would not really fit what is being measured. having “fully 100% vision” doesn’t really tell you what the resolution is, while 20/20, 20/40 ect does.

Going into stronger detail, the term 20/20 is a measure of visual acuity. This notation is now only used in North America, while Australia and New Zealand uses a 6/6 notation.

These figures are based on letter charts which are used in the standard sight test, such as the Snellen chart. The top number refers to the distance at which the chart is viewed – 20 feet (or 6 metres) – and the bottom number refers to the distance at which a person with ideal vision can see a letter clearly. Thus if you have 20/40 (or 6/12) vision then you will just be able to see something from a distance of 20 feet that a person with perfect eyesight will be able to see from 40 feet.

31 Jan
Blog

How the Eye Works: The Anatomy of The Human Eye

After surveying multiple people on www.changemyeye.com regarding the most important human senses — sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch — people consistently tell us that their eyesight is the mode of perception they value (and fear losing) most. However, most people don’t have a good understanding of the anatomy of the eye, how the eye works, and health problems that can affect the eye.

HOW THE EYE WORKS

In many ways, the human eye works much like a modern day camera:

  1. Light is focused primarily by the cornea — the clear front surface of the eye, which acts like a camera lens.
  2. The iris of the eye functions like the diaphragm of a camera, controlling the amount of light reaching the back of the eye by automatically adjusting the size of the pupil (aperture).
  3. The eye’s crystalline lens is located directly behind the pupil and further focuses light. Through a process called accommodation, this lens helps the eye automatically focus on near and approaching objects, like an autofocus camera lens.
  4. Light focused by the cornea and crystalline lens (and limited by the iris and pupil) then reaches the retina — the light-sensitive inner lining of the back of the eye. The retina acts like an electronic image sensor of a digital camera, converting optical images into electronic signals. The optic nerve then transmits these signals to the visual cortex — the part of the brain that controls our sense of sight.

Eye Antomy - Change My Eyes

31 Jan
Blog

Eye Anatomy: How Do Eyes Focus?

The eye is a complex organ that manipulates light much like a camera does; it has lenses to change the focus and a sensor to recognize intensity and color.
How Does the Eye Focus? Starting with the Cornea
The first layer of the eye that light hits is the cornea, the surface of the eye. The cornea is a dome-shaped lens that starts the process of focusing light, contributing approximately two-thirds of the eye’s focusing power. But the cornea is like the lens of eyeglasses – it always refracts light the same amount, unlike the lens of a camera which can focus at different depths.
The shape of the cornea is maintained by the aqueous humour, a gel that lies between the cornea and the lens.
The Pupil and Iris Regulate Amount of Light
The iris is the colorful part of the eye. The pupil, the black spot in the middle of the iris, is actually just a hole in the iris, which can contract or relax to adjust the size of the pupil. In low light, the pupil expands to allow more light into the eye. In bright light, it contracts to protect the eye and increase contrast.
The Lens Focuses Light
Behind the pupil lies the crystalline lens, which is responsible for focusing light. The lens can change its focal length, like a camera. This is what allows you to focus close up on a book, or far away at the horizon, but not both at the same time. To switch from one to the other, the lens actually bends and changes shape because of contractions in the cilliary muscles.
A healthy lens is critical to good vision. As people age, the lens can become cloudy, causing a cataract, or stiff, causing presbyopia. When the lens becomes stiff, the cilliary muscles can no longer change the shape of the lens to focus on up close objects.
The Retina Detects Light
From the crystalline lens, light travels through another gel known as the vitreous humor, which maintains the shape of the eye, to the retina in the back of the eye. The retina contains light-receptor cells known as rods and cones. Rods are very sensitive and simply detect light, giving us our nearly-colorless night vision, while cones detect different colors. Cones are concentrated in the fovea, a pit in the center of the retina, providing very sharp central vision.
Oddities of the Retina: Flipped and Holey
The lens projects an image onto the retina, but it is rotated 180 degrees (upside down and backwards). If you flip upside down to watch a movie, what you see is actually what is being projected onto the retinas of your bemused friends. This is because the shape of the lens causes light to converge through a single point inside the lens, emerging out the back like light leaving a projector.
There is also a gap in your vision known as the blind spot, where blood vessels and nerves pass through the retina. So why don’t you see a flipped world with a hole in it? The brain corrects for both of these, providing you with a properly oriented image and filling in the blind spot with the surrounding color.
To recap: light is partially focused when it passes through the cornea, then travels through the aqueous humour to the crystalline lens, which lets the eye focus on different depths. The light converges in the lens and travels out the other side flipped, traveling through the vitreous humour to the retina on the inner back surface of the eye, where rods and cones detect light. Then your brain presents a coherent, correctly-oriented image.
31 Jan
Blog

The Most Common Eye Colors

Ever wanted to change your eye color? well, now you can at www.changemyeye.com

But now for our weekly blog, what really are the most common eye colors?.

Eye Color Guide – The Most Common Eye Colors
The human eye is both beautiful and unique. Much like a fingerprint, each individual’s eye color is specific only to them, with no others sharing the same shape, color and appearance. So what eye colors are the most common, and which are the rarest?

What is the most common eye color? Which eye color is the rarest?

Brown Eyes
Brown eyes are the most common eye color in the world with over 55% of the world’s population having brown eyes. Brown eye color is a dominant genetic trait, and is created by the presence of melanin in the eye. Over fifty percent of the world’s population has brown eyes, with nearly all individuals from Africa and Asia sharing brown eye color. Brown eyes are typically darker than other eye colors, and they may even appear black in certain individuals.

Hazel Eyes

Hazel eyes are similar to brown eyes, although they are typically lighter in color, and have more of a green-yellow tint. Hazel eyes have a higher concentration of melanin (pigment) around the eye’s border, which can result in a multi-colored appearance that varies between copper and green depending on the lighting. Most people estimate that around 5-8% of the world’s population has hazel colored eyes.

Blue Eyes

Blue eyes are genetically recessive, and therefore much less common worldwide. Blue eyes are formed by the absence of pigments in the eye, where the blue color is formed by the scattering of light as it’s reflected off the iris. While blue eyes are less common than brown eyes, they are frequently found from nationalities located near the Baltic sea in northern Europe. It’s estimated that approximately 8% of the world’s population has blue eyes.

Green Eyes

Green eye color is often confused with hazel eye color, yet is entirely separate and distinct. Green eye color is the rarest color found around the world, and it is estimated that only around 2% of the world’s population has green colored eyes. Green eye color is a result of a mild amount of pigmentation in the eye with a golden tint. When combined with the natural blue scattering of the eye, the colors mix to give a green appearance. Green eye color is most common in northern and central Europe, but can also be found in western Asian cultures on rare occasion.

Silver Eyes

Silver eye color is also quite rare, although many consider silver eyes to be a variation of blue eye color. Like blue eyes, silver eyes are the result of a very low amount of pigmentation in the eye, which reflects a gray-silver appearance. Silver eye color is most common in eastern European countries, and is one of the rarer eye colors worldwide.

Amber Eyes

Amber eyes show off a yellow-copper tone, which results from the yellow colored pigment lipochrome. Amber eyes are very rare worldwide, and are most common in Asia and South American countries. Amber eye color can range from golden yellow to a more copper tone.

31 Jan
Blog

Why blue-eyed men prefer blue-eyed women – but not vice versa

Most people learn in high school (if they’re paying attention) that human eye color is a genetic trait which follows fairly simple rules. The primary gene that controls eye color exists in several forms, called alleles. The protein produced by one of the alleles causes the eyes to be brown, while a variant allele producing a slightly different protein does not. Since the human genome contains two copies of each gene, if even one of these copies is the allele for brown eyes, brown will be the resulting color, regardless of the other allele. Such an allele is said to be “dominant”. Another eye color (e. g. blue) will result only if both copies of the gene are non-brown alleles. Such alleles are said to be “recessive”.

Children receive one copy of each paired chromosome from each parent. It follows that if one parent has two copies of a dominant gene, every one of their children will receive at least one copy, regardless of what the other parent has. All children of this mother and father will have brown eyes, if even one parent has two brown eye alleles, and even if the other parent has two blue eye alleles.

If both parents have one brown and one blue allele, then for any particular child, there’s a 1 in 4 chance of receiving two brown alleles, a 1 in 4 chance of receiving two blue alleles (the only case that will result in blue eyes), and a 2 in 4 chance of receiving one brown and one blue allele (hence brown eyes). If one parent has blue eyes, and the other has both a brown and a blue allele, then the odds are 50/50 for each of their children to have either brown or blue eyes. So if one or both parents have brown eyes, it’s possible for them to have blue-eyed children. But when both parents have blue eyes, so all of their alleles are for blue eyes, all of their children will have blue eyes. In that case, if any child has brown eyes, it must be the case that one parent – most likely the male – is not the biological parent. Oops.

So a blue-eyed man has an interesting advantage over men with brown eyes – a very dependable way of knowing that he is not the father of a particular child, provided he mates with a blue-eyed woman. Further, a blue-eyed man who regards blue-eyed women as more attractive than women of other eye colors is more likely to mate with blue-eyed women. And so such a blue-eyed man has a selective advantage over other blue-eyed men who have no such preference (or a preference for brown-eyed women).

This would be advantageous, at least in prehistoric times, if in addition such a man was less inclined to provide for a child without blue eyes – even if there was no conscious recognition that the child could not be his own. Some recent research has indicated that blue-eyed men sometimes actually, if unconsciously, do have a tendency to regard blue-eyed women as more “attractive”, and hence (presumably) are more likely to choose them as mates:

Eighty-eight male and female students were asked to rate facial attractiveness of models on a computer. The pictures were close-ups of young adult faces, unfamiliar to the participants. The eye color of each model was manipulated, so that for each model’s face two versions were shown, one with the natural eye color (blue/brown) and another with the other color (brown/blue). The participants’ own eye color was noted.

Both blue-eyed and brown-eyed women showed no difference in their preferences for male models of either eye color. Similarly, brown-eyed men showed no preference for either blue-eyed or brown-eyed female models. However, blue-eyed men rated blue-eyed female models as more attractive than brown-eyed models.

Since a mother almost always can be sure a given child is hers (except for rare events like accidental switching of infants), a mechanism that provides a way to recognize that a child isn’t her own provides little additional advantage. And so, blue-eyed women do not have an evolutionary advantage from a tendency to regard blue-eyed men as more attractive than others. So they do not, in fact, have that tendency.
If you’re looking around for an example of specific, and unexpected, behavior for which evolutionary psychology offers the simplest explanation, this may be a good choice.