What Is A Hard Contact Lens or RGP?

Way back when, there was only one way to correct vision: glasses. But some people wanted to get out of glasses (and still see). Refractive surgery wasn’t an option at that time; Lasik didn’t exist; Lens replacement surgery was way too crude for refractive lens exchange to be a viable option. Fortunately, another option was developed: hard contact lenses.

Hard contacts provided a solution to glasses independence. These particular lenses are made up of a very rigid gas-permeable (where the term RGP comes from) plastic that sits directly on the cornea. This plastic is shaped into a lens correcting vision! RGP lenses were a breakthrough in early glasses independence.

But hard contact lenses also have a few more advantages as well. Because these lenses are rigid, they can actually cover up and mask subtle imperfections in the cornea. These imperfections cause higher order aberrations such as glare (especially in conditions such as keratoconus) and covering up these imperfections can actually improve vision even more!

But hard contacts lenses were ultimately mostly replaced by the soft contact lenses that we see today. How come? The two main reasons came down to comfort and cost. Having a rigid object in the eye can be a bit more discomforting for people than something soft in the eye. For some people it works very well, others just have a much harder time getting used to it. And hard contact lenses just can’t compete with the soft contact lenses on price.

Hard contact lenses still have their place in today’s eye landscape. But as technology has improved, newer soft contact lenses have become the go-to way to correct vision.

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