contact lens buisness
Cosmetic Lens Update
These contact lenses are slowly coming into their own -- with benefits for patients and doctors alike.
By Christopher Kent, Senior Associate Editor

Cosmetic contact lenses have received a lot of attention in the media during the past year, thanks to their illicit availability at various nonmedical outlets such as flea markets, convenience stores and beach shops -- not to mention over the Internet. But these lenses are hardly the exclusive province of teenagers and party-goers. Today, they represent a growing portion of the contact lens market for patients of all ages, and ophthalmologists are dispensing them almost as often as optometrists.

Two potential advantages of offering these lenses are obvious: First, they help to attract new patients. Second, the fact that they change the wearer's appearance invites multiple purchases in different colors. Ironically, even their unsupervised sale outside the doctor's office has had positive side-effects. The publicity generated by the FDA's actions last fall has increased awareness of these lenses, and the need to warn patients about the dangers of unsupervised use means doctors are bringing up the subject -- which increases the likelihood of a patient trying them.

While estimates vary, the retail market for cosmetic contact lenses in this country is probably about $250 million per year, and growing. To help shed some light on how this is affecting ophthalmologists, here are some statistics collected by Health Products Research (White-house, N.J.) as part of their Vision Information Services surveys of both consumers and physicians.

• In 2001, about 8% of soft contact lens wearers surveyed in the United States wore opaque colored lenses; 9.7% wore enhanced colored lenses. That translates to about 2.4 million opaque lens wearers and 2.8 million enhancing tint wearers.
  How these groups were divided by age is shown in the chart above. As you can see, in 2001 the largest portion of the opaque market (68%) wasn't teenagers, but adults between the ages of 18 and 39. The majority of patients wearing enhanced tint lenses (65%) were between the ages of 26 and 64.
• About 9% of soft lenses prescribed in 2002 were cosmetic. With more companies bringing new cosmetic brands to market, and all the publicity about illicit sales, this percentage is likely to grow.
• Of patient visits for cosmetic lenses reported in the 2002 survey:
  14% of patients had not worn contact lenses before
  22% were contact lens wearers switching brands
  64% stayed with cosmetic lenses they were already wearing.
• Less than 3% of the cosmetic lenses prescribed in 2002 were toric lenses. (This number probably reflects the limited number of toric options available.)
• Despite the difference in average patient age, M.D.s and O.D.s reported close to the same number of cosmetic lens patients (per location dispensing) in 2002 -- 64 for M.D.s, vs. 69 for O.D.s. (In contrast, chains reported 133 cosmetic patients per dispensing location.)
• About three times more women than men wear cosmetic lenses. This isn't surprising, given the weight our culture places on a woman's appearance. (At the same time, this means that 600,000 men wear opaque lenses, and almost 800,000 wear enhancing lenses.)

Into the Mainstream

As changing your eye color becomes more accepted as a legitimate "addition" to a contact lens prescription, the market for unsupervised sales will undoubtedly drop. Options such as toric cosmetic lenses -- and other variations such as multifocals -- will increase. It's a promising trend, for both patients and practices.