Freak369's Full Review: Coopervision Frequency 55, Box
If you’ve read any of my other recent reviews of contact lenses you will know that I had a really bad experience with an optometrist that insists that my prescription changed after being the same for seventeen years. She ordered standard contact lenses for me even though I said that I couldn’t wear them because I get extremely bad calcium deposits. The CooperVision Vantage Thin FW lenses were a complete bust and when I contact CooperVision they in turn got in touch with my new eye doctor to arrange to have lenses sent to him to ‘make up for’ the others. The Frequency 55’s were one of the lenses that I got to try out, he stressed that I needed disposable lenses because of the calcium deposits and pitting. Neither of us are clear about the wearing schedule of these; the information that came with them said that they were a daily disposable meaning that you wear them for a day and throw them away, the information that we were given when he called them from his office was different. Per the customer service agent, they were weekly wear lenses that were to be worn for one week then tossed away. When we looked at the package that it came in, it just had the basic information about base curve, diameter, power, product number [0473]... the usual stuff you find on the foil tabs of contact lenses.
CooperVision Frequency 55 Lenses
I’ve never had much luck with CooperVision lenses but I flat out refuse to trash their products; just because they don’t work well for doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to work for other people. Sometimes people think that all disposable lenses are the same, made up of 55 - 58 % water and some proprietary contact lens material; they aren’t all the same, not by a long shot. I think the biggest reason that these didn’t feel comfortable after a few days is the lower water content in them. The Acuvue 2 lenses are make up of 58% water and the Frequency 55 are made up of 55% water, from what I understand, the higher the water content the more comfortable the fit. They were nice to wear for a couple of days but then they got scratchy and felt dry all the time; that is when I started to think that these were daily wear disposable, not weekly wear. Does the 55 stand for 55 hours? 55 days? 55% water content? It’s sort of like that mystery 33 on the inside label of a bottle of Rolling Rock.
It looks like this is strike two for the CooperVision line for me; I still have a couple more pairs to try out [Expressions] and I am hoping that those work out better because I would really like to have another company to fall back on if the Johnson & Johnson ones are out of stock. They are well made lenses that come packaged in individual foil lined plastic pods; another nice thing about these is that they have the blue tint to them so if you drop them or they pop out of your eye, they are easy to spot. This is not a tint that will change the color of your eyes so don’t order them thinking that they will do this. From what I can tell there are no markings on the lenses, some have a 1-2-3 on the lens so you can tell if they are being inserted correctly or if you need to flip them around. As I said, they are comfortable the first day or so but after that my eyes got really sore and felt dry all the time. I did pop them into a cleaning solution to see if they would feel better after a soak but when I put them back in a few days later they still felt dry. Maybe someone from CooperVision will come across this and be able to shed some light on these lenses. Are they to be worn for one day and thrown away or can you were them for a week? Two weeks? A month?
I tried to find out this information [wear schedule, prices, strengths available etc] online but the CooperVision website isn’t exactly packed full of information; to make things even more confusing, online sites that were selling this lens had them listed as daily disposable, weekly disposable and one month wear items. Maybe I am missing something, is there more than one Frequency 55 from this company or all these sites just as confused as me? The only way I would recommend this lens to anyone is if they can get solid information about the amount of wear time you can get from these and if they only wear lenses from time to time. To clear things up I want to add that I didn’t sleep in these or wear them for more than ten hours at a time. Maybe my eyes need that extra three percent water that the Johnson and Johnson lenses have, maybe it is fate telling me to stick with the Acuvue family.
The Bottom Line
There’s really not much else to say about these lenses other than CooperVision needs to get on top of marking their products to include accurate information for consumers. Even my optometrist was confused by the conflicting details of these lenses. He doesn’t carry CooperVision lenses outside of the specialty NFL and Color Expression ones. After cleaning them and trying them again they were still dry and uncomfortable to they got pitched. Let’s hope the others ones that they sent work out better, they are supposed to be weekly wear but only time will tell if I’ll be able to wear them more than a few days without the same thing happening. I don’t want to discourage people from trying CooperVision lenses because they do have great customer service but I haven’t had much luck with their products. Your best bet is to see if your optometrist has a few pair of trial lenses to set you up with to see if these will work for you. Any optometrist that says that he or she doesn’t have trial lenses from any company is a bold face liar ... so take a deep look into their eyes and see if they are brown so you’ll know they are full of it.
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