November 5, 2004

Letters - Vol. 4

Filed under: Contacts (and why they suck), Letters, Miscellaneous — Shauna @ 9:12 pm

Dear Bausch & Lomb,

I am writing to you concerning your product, the SofLens®. A year ago, my optometrist casually changed my prescription to this brand, and myself, not being the overly observant type, merely noticed a difference in the box packaging and thought, “Huh.”

However, it did not take even this non-astute person long to realize that there is a serious flaw in the design of your product. When one removes the contact from one’s cornea, it immediately welds itself into a tiny, mangled ball. A ball that can be likened to a wad of congealed chewing gum - not bubble gum, but the nasty Wrigley® stuff that sticks to you when attempting to frantically free your fingers from it.

So what you end up with is no longer a mild-mannered, blue-tinted concave-shaped contact, but rather, a crumpled mass of extremely fragile material. To attempt to relinquish the death-grip the contact has on itself, one has to use their fingernails in a feeble attempt to re-open the contact. As you may or may not guess, this results in a beautifully jagged tear straight down the middle of the product. I can solely attribute my 5:1 ratio for contact usage per eye (left vs. right) in this manner. Why this product defect affects only the left contact, I cannot say.

Your Web site touts the following false statements benefits:
* Exceptional vision
* All day comfort
* Easy handling
* Easy adaption

While I disagree with all four selling points, the one I take the most exception to is the “easy handling” statement. If by “easy handling” you mean having to pry the contact apart as if it is an alien organism hellbent on suctioning itself into a wad and sucking my retina out of my eyeball, then yes, that statement is correct. If you mean “easy handling” in the fact that one has longer than .008 seconds to place the contact into a proper saline-filled receptacle before it glues itself shut, then sadly, your assertion is grossly misleading.

I hope your company will spend a few more R&D dollars in the future to remedy this defect. As for myself, I will be saving my money to get the LASIK® procedure.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment