Should you buy contact lenses online?

Should I buy contact lenses online, or nah? I decided to find out…

Contact lenses are the bane of my life.

Well, not really, obviously. Contact lenses give me the gift of sight, after all, and I’m very grateful for that: I mean, if I lived in Victorian times, I wouldn’t even HAVE contact lenses, and where would I be then, I ask you? Probably wearing some kind of of hideous, half-moon specs, strung around my neck with an old bootlace or something: and as every reader of Victorian literature knows, that’s NO way to catch an Earl, is it?

But I digress.

Contact lenses, as I say, give me the gift of sight, which is awesome, but which technically isn’t a “gift”, really, given that I have to pay for the lenses every month: or every other month, in my case. I have very dry eyes, which means I mostly wear my glasses (which are neither hideous nor strung around my neck with an old bootlace, just FYI), around the house, and save my contact lenses for those times when I’m going out somewhere. Because I don’t wear them every day, daily disposables are more cost effective than monthly / fortnightly lenses for me, but let’s face it, it’s still money I’d rather be spending on something else. Like shoes, say. Or a house in California. Or a dozen bichon frise puppies. Or… I’ve made my point.

So, should I buy contact lenses online? 

Enter Vision Direct, who’ve just released their own brand of daily disposable contact lenses – which just so happen to be designed to help prevent dryness. Oh, and which ALSO just so happen to be £10 cheaper than my existing lenses. Well, obviously I was going to be interested in trying them, and I just want to quickly say here that although this post is sponsored by Vision Direct, the reason I was so happy to work with this brand is that they’re actually the people I buy my lenses from anyway. I’ve been using them for a couple of years now, and have been really impressed with the service: in fact, because of my tendency to leave things to the last minute, there’s been a couple of occasions where I’ve ordered lenses on a Friday afternoon, and they’ve arrived first thing Saturday morning, which never fails to amaze me.

(They do have a reminder service, and you can also opt to have your lenses automatically re-ordered, but because I don’t wear mine every day, I can never really predict when I’ll need to replace them. It does exist, though, if you need it…)

Anyway, I’ve been trialling the Aura lenses for a couple of weeks now, and the main thing I’ve noticed about them compared to my usual lenses is that there’s really nothing to notice. As in, there’s really no difference between them and my usual brand: same level of comfort, same standard of vision – I really wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, really. Now, there are plenty of times when you really want to see a difference between a new product and an existing one, but this isn’t one of them: when I agreed to try these, my main hope was that they’d be every bit as good as my usual brand – but cheaper. And, well, they are. So I know what I’ll be buying in the future then, basically.

The lenses cost £7.99 per packet, and are suitable for most contact lens wearers, so as long as your prescription is compatible, you should be able to try them. Oh, and they normally throw in a pack of Haribo with your order, too: don’t you just love brands who do that?!

[This post is sponsored by Vision Direct.]