It was in fact ordinary prescription contact lenses that changed my daughter's life not color contacts and allowing her to swap her glasses for contact lenses in her middle teens was possibly one of the best things we have ever done for her. Her whole character changed for the better so when she expressed an interest in color contacts we were more than pleased to investigate.

My daughter needed to wear glasses from a very early age because she is very long sighted. She also had to wear an ugly opaque patch over one eye for an hour a day for years to correct a 'lazy eye'. The reason for the patch was to encourage the lazy eye to work better. It worked but it took months and months before we noticed any change as I remember it. Neither the glasses nor the patch did anything for her confidence and so she spent most of her early school years as a quite, self-conscious mouse of a girl. This quiet character persisted into her early teens, long after the eye patch had done its work.

My daughter has been a keen dancer since she was very small and I have to say, she is pretty good at it. But when it came to performances she never excelled because she would not use her glasses. She wasn't comfortable with wearing them on stage. Unfortunately she couldn't see anything without them and that turned out to be quite a problem for her. What she would have given for a pair of color contacts back then.

We decided to try her out with contact lenses as soon as she was old enough and are we glad we did. Her whole personality changed literally overnight. She became more confident and outspoken. No longer did she suffer at the hands of the bullies in school because now she had 'attitude'. Her schoolwork improved and so did her dance performances, rather dramatically too. I stood back in awe at the difference those tiny contact lenses had made.

She doesn't use color contact lenses very often but when she does they can make a very dramatic impact on her appearance. She occasionally wears them when she goes out in the evening and wants to make an impression.

My daughter is now studying medicine at university and she is doing very well indeed. I believe that contact lenses are at least partly responsible for this success although sometimes you can catch her using her glasses when studying, probably because it makes her look like a more serious student.