Do you want to travel and bring daily contact lenses (dailies) with you? How exciting! We'd love to help you plan your trip and tell you about the best ways to travel with dailies. For a smooth, fun, and hassle-free trip while wearing dailies, here are five things you need to do.
1. Keep your hands clean
Traveling with dailies means you'll be handling contact lenses and touching your eyes every day. As such, you need to keep your hands clean before inserting or removing your contact lenses.
Clean your hands using antibacterial soap and water (making sure to dry them completely) before handling contact lenses. You should also bring rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, or sanitary wipes. This way, you can still clean your hands even if a clean water source isn't available.
Traveling, especially if it's a vacation, involves spending a significant amount of time outdoors. Being outdoors exposes you to dirt, allergens, dust, pollen, and pollutants. These elements can affect your eyes and get into your contact lenses, so you need to be prepared.
When traveling with dailies, always pack extra contact lenses. With spare contact lenses handy, you can easily replace your current contacts if they get too uncomfortable to wear due to dirt, allergens, dust, or pollen.
Generally speaking, you want to pack one extra pair of contact lenses for each day of your trip. If you're going on a two-week vacation, then you'd need to bring 14 additional pairs of contact lenses.
3. Bring lubricant eye drops or artificial tears
Being outdoors and spending time under the sun can dry out your eyes. Prevent dry eyes by using over-the-counter lubricant eye drops or artificial tears. You can buy these products at any pharmacy without a prescription, and they are safe on the eyes as long as you use them as intended.
There are a wide variety of brands available, and they all have different ingredients. You may have to try out a few brands to figure out which is best for you. You should also consult your eye care professional about which specific brand is right for you and the type of contact lenses you are wearing
4. Bring your prescription eyeglasses
Under no circumstances should you leave for your trip without an up-to-date pair of prescription eyeglasses.
Travel can be unpredictable. You might suffer eye allergies that make it uncomfortable for you to wear your dailies. You can try to relieve the symptoms of your eye allergies, but bringing your eyeglasses with you is still best. Your eyeglasses will give you clear vision even without your contact lenses.
5. Protect your eyes from UV radiation
No trip is complete without a pair of high-quality sunglasses. Sunglasses offer the best UV protection for your eyes and the skin around your eyes, so never leave home without them—regardless of your destination.
To get the highest level of UV protection, choose sunglasses with UV 400 filters. These sunglasses can block 99% to 100% of UVA and UVB rays.
Conclusion
Follow these tips, and you'll have an easy and stress-free trip, no matter where you're going. Just keep in mind that the advice in this post is not a replacement for the advice of a licensed eye care professional. For other questions or concerns about traveling with contact lenses, you need to consult your eye care professional.
