I've been wearing contact lenses a long time. I was first issued daily-wear disposables when I was fourteen. After being late to school every goddamn day for two weeks, my mother marched me back to the optometrist and got me extended-wear disposables -- the kind you could sleep in -- instead. A lot of people don't tolerate these well, but I do, and I've been wearing them ever since.
Fitting these lenses is not the exact science they would like you to believe. Getting eyeglass prescriptions in general is not. They stick you in front of a rig with switchable lenses and ask you which one you like better, ffs. You go to the eye doctor to make sure your eyeballs aren't going to fall out, not for custom tailored prosthetics. Neither glasses nor contacts are ever 100% custom-fitted to your needs, at least outside of very specific circumstances. Glasses are ground to "close enough" specs from the settings available on the machine, and lenses come in fixed size/power combinations.
If you wear rigid gas permeable lenses, you do need them to conform pretty well to the front center of your eyeball; as the name suggests, RGPs do not flex, and if they don't adhere well you will blink them right out immediately. In fact, the suggested procedure for taking them out is just to pull your eyelid taut and let a blink peel them right off the surface of your eye, where they ideally fall into your other hand. RGPs are not common anymore. The last person I knew who wore them had a prescription of something like -12.00, which is beyond what you can even grind acrylic eyeglass lenses for, and definitely qualifies as 'very specific circumstances'.
Soft lenses are less picky. They're squishy and flexible, and fitting them is more like fitting clothing than like fitting a new leg. Toric lenses are the contact equivalent of bifocals, where the corrective power is different in the middle and at the edge. You don't want these to stay bang in the middle of your cornea, or you'd be unable to change between the regions, but they need to drift a certain minimal amount. Lenses that correct for astigmatism are wobbled along an axis that goes through the center of the lens and need to stay in a particular orientation; they are slightly weighted or have a flat edge at the bottom to keep them upright.
If torics and astigmatics are the lens equivalent of tailored clothing, then then ones I wear are basically jersey knit. I have one power correction, same in both eyes, and astigmatism not worth bothering with. The prescription has been the same my entire adult life. I'd still be wearing the same kind of lenses I was given in high school, but they were discontinued a while ago, so I swapped to CooperVision for my clears. I've actually been fitted for a lot more kinds than those two, all of which had radically different (in contact lens terms) base curvatures and diameters -- it just doesn't really matter when all I need is a bit of hydrogel to recontour the front of my eyeballs a bit so I can see things at a distance. If I stick it on and it stays comfortably where I put it, then it fits. CooperVision "Biofinity" varieties are easy to get and their quality has stayed consistent even when they revise their materials and manufacturing practices, which is not something I can say for everything I've tried.
Colored lenses, on the other hand, I order from the UK. I order all of them from the UK these days; it's cheaper and faster if you don't have vision insurance, especially if whatever hole-in-the-wall place your uninsured ass makes the "new patient special!" appointment at doesn't happen to have your preferred size and brand in stock. (Strip mall optometrists, like Victoria's Secret, will generally "fit" you into whatever they have handy in the back. No thank you, I want my regulars please.) In the US, you technically need a separate prescription for colored lenses -- and sometimes each color, if the otherwise-identical lenses are branded differently -- even if they are literally the exact same as your clear lenses but with some printing in the middle, whereas UK suppliers are very obliging about just mailing me the thing I fucking ordered without an interrogation.
One of my earliest tries at color lenses was a type called "softcolors" that had translucent screen printing over the entire center of the lens. There was a very faint tinting effect that wasn't noticeable at all unless I wore one color and one clear lens, and even then it didn't bother me. I had an unusually bluish-evergreen color. I really liked them, but they don't seem to be out there anymore. Everything I can find now is the "ring" style, where there are streaks of color around the iris part of the lens with a clear area in the center. I've no idea why the change, other than the softcolors only work on light eyes, and only work really brilliantly on eyes like mine, which are the gray-blue structural color you get from Tyndall scattering when there's no pigment in the iris at all. You'd think this would be the default in natural redheads, who are generally short of pigment everywhere, but it doesn't take a lot of melanin to turn eyes honey brown, or a lot of lipid deposits to make them look green, so those are more common than you'd think.
Nothing wrong with my normal color, it's just fun to change and I like decorating myself.
The first set of ring-style lenses I had were huge compared to my normal ones; the color streaks were opaque and the extra-wide rim going across half my sclera was necessarily to stabilize them and prevent the pigment from drifting into my field of view. The colors all seem to be screen-printed dots now, which makes that less of a problem, and everyone's "natural colors" are all pretty much the same diameter as my Biofinity clears. I find the current style less convincing than the tints or opaque ones, because a band of your natural color can show through the middle when your pupils constrict. I suppose most people consider that invisible at normal conversational distance.
The second ones I got were FreshLook, which seem to fit across all their lines, and are the ones I normally order now. I'm fond of the "Dimensions". The only "green" they had at first was the very jade-y one with a smattering of honey-colored dots in the middle, which changes more than you'd think, since my eyes have no brown/gold in them at all naturally. They've expanded the color range a bit, and I think I'll try a different one next time I order. FreshLook lenses are 1-2 week extended wear and come in boxes of 6 lenses, which for me is 3 complete pairs, and in my experience can be cleaned/stored/reworn just fine if you use them for shorter stints. They are idiotically expensive from US sources, running close to $100/box. Ordering them from the UK is less than half that, including overseas shipping. (For further information: My regular Biofinity lenses are $43.99 + S&H uninsured from 1800Contacts, a big independent supplier in the US. The exact same lenses are £13.99 to literally anybody with a credit card on NextDayLenses.com, which is under 20USD, and they are more than happy to mail all your shit straight to the colonies for about $7.50. Feel free to rage.)
FreshLook doesn't have quite a full range of fantasy colors, and I try to keep these things around for costuming, so I took a chance last time I did the rounds and plonked for a pair of indigo contacts from Bausch & Lomb. Sadly, I don't like them quite as much. I don't know what they're packaged in, but when I took them out of their plastic blisters they were oddly tacky and wanted to fold over and stick to themselves, which usually means they're dehydrated. I did get them to adhere to my (palms and fingers and) eyeball once out of the package, but they still weren't very cooperative. Taking them out and giving them an overnight soak in my normal cleaning/storage solution -- ironically, also by Bausch & Lomb -- made them behave much better, although still not as nicely as the Biofinity or FreshLook lenses.
What do we think of the indigo? It's much more striking in person. Not as natural-looking as the jade green ones, but fun nonetheless.
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