Contact lenses for cosplay
Contents
Why?
Because your character is badass and has red/gold/green eyes, and your eyes are neither red nor gold nor green 
Procedure
In Australia you need a prescription to get contacts.
- Visit your optometrist, they need to check that contacts are suitable for your eyes (ie. won't make you blind for some reason). This is largely a formality.
The optometrist produces a prescription. This roughly says that you're okay to get contacts, and also how messed up your eyes are if you're myopic/hyperopic/astigmatic
- Get a copy of the prescription from your optometrist
- Most people get contacts from their optometrist, that's not a bad time to ask about proper care and usage of lenses, you'll probably get some trial lenses to see how it goes for you
- Now that you've got the prescription, you're also free to get your lenses from wherever else too
Good things to know
- The optometrist visit is covered by medicare
- It presumably has a nominal dollar-value, but you can't get it by paying for it, it's just covered
- Getting contacts online is usually cheaper, but there's roughly a 4x incidence of infection in people who do
- Citation needed for the 4x figure
- This doesn't say anything about the absolute risk of infection (ie. 1-in-4million to 1-in-1million is kinda no big deal)
- This infection risk is mostly due to poor hygiene and not having been instructed properly
- A prescription for contact lenses is pretty straightforward
- Base - curvature of your eyeball, and critical for a good fit
- Power - degree of correction provided by the lens; positive for long-sightedness and negative for short-sightedness; probably written to two decimal places with 0.25 increments
- Diameter - may not be specified, it's not going to vary all that much wherever you go
Cost and experience
This is just how it was for me, it'll probably be very different for you.
- OPSM on George St., just south of Martin Place
- $100 for the consultations
- Split $60/$40 over two visits, spaced one week apart
- The eye testing itself was already covered by Medicare. It's been two years since I last had my eyes checked, so I was entitled to a Medicare freebie
- I got half a dozen pairs of trial lenses to use during the week, and a bottle of saline/disinfectant to keep things clean (hands, and the lenses if you drop them or handle them too much)
- Focus Dailies, made by Ciba Vision
- My eyes aren't too bad, things might be different if you need significant correction
- The lenses themselves were great, they're fairly comfortable and easy to get used-to
- The do, however, take a lot of getting used-to to insert and remove them
- I found it very difficult to stop my eye from twitching and blinking whenever I touched them
- It's hard to tell which way has the correct curvature when the lenses are very wet, meaning it's easy to put them in the wrong way
- After a week of practising, it now only takes a couple of attempts to insert each lens (maybe 5-10min total)
- The people who can do this casually, anywhere, and without a mirror, are certifiably crazy
I don't plan to wear them all that often (I loooove glasses), so I bought a box of 30 lenses
- They have a shelf life of at least four years, so expiry is a non-issue
- More correctly, I bought a box of 30 lenses for each eye (I'm not lucky enough to need the same correction in both eyes)
- $48 for each box, $96 in total
Which works out to $3.20 each day I want to wear them, current as of 2010-07-27
- Updated pricing, for Acuvue 1-day Moist lenses
- $56 for each box, $112 in total
$3.73 each day I want to wear them, current as of 2011-11-21
Reviews of specific brands and lenses
Attached photos