Posts Tagged ‘Iris’

Look me in the Eye…..

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

With growing awareness of body language and eye contact, nowadays we’re more conscious than ever of the importance of how we come across to others. The pressure is increased even further if you suffer from an eye condition that affects the way you look, especially when it comes to the super sensitive issue of your eyes.

One of the most common problems patients suffer from is lazy eye, or  as people often call it. One eye wanders and does not focus as with as normal eye. This can make it difficult for other people to tell where you are looking. It can be successfully operated on, so do bring it up with your optician, it may be possible for you to be referred to the hospital eye service for assessment.

Cosmetic problems with the coloured part of the eye, the Iris, are more unusual. We have patients with different coloured eyes, or with a segment of the Iris missing. This can be treated with coloured contact lenses, which we can use to match the different colours, or to disguise a gap in the Iris. This can produce excellent results without resorting to surgery.

Ptosis is a term which covers drooping lids due to muscle defects. The muscles which control the eyelids are a complex mechanism and any difficulties with the system can impair vision if the lids droop down across the eye. Surgery can help in some cases, or you can have a slim metal prop attached to your specs which lifts the faulty lid.

Any of these issues may also be helped when it comes to changing your specs – small and fashionable frames, possibly with a light tint will give your more confidence and a small measure of camouflage. It’s never to late to look into solutions for these problems, and new techniques may give you options now that weren’t possible a few

The Perfect Pupil!

Friday, May 7th, 2010

If the eyes are the windows to our souls, are our pupils are the very gateway to our inner most thoughts?  They allow others to see right inside us – good news if you’re an optician!  The pupil is just a space, but the various structures inside the eye absorb light, so we see it as a velvet black circle, that reacts to pain, emotion, and more practically, light.

The pupil allows us to have comfortable vision on the brightest of days, as it constricts down and allows only the essential amount of light in. This prevents harmful UV from reaching the delicate tissues within the eye. It’s dangerous to wear tinted glasses that don’t give UV protection, because the dark tint will fool the pupil into not constricting, and UV will flood in.

The coloured part of our eye, the Iris, is a ring of smooth muscle that surrounds the pupil, doing the work in dilating and constricting. The sensory path of each iris is linked, so normally if one pupil is stimulated then both will react. At it’s smallest the pupil goes down to about 3 millimetres, at it’s largest up to 9mm. Pupil size alters with age as well as the constant changes mentioned above.

Control of pupil size and our response to seeing the change in others is all involuntary. Research has shown that we find faces with larger pupils more attractive, because looking at us with their dilated pupils we get the message that we’re attractive to them. If we see a downcast expression with small pupils we perceive it as a sad face, and our pupils constrict down too. All this going on without us really being aware of it!

The pupil is a miracle of engineering, and can flag up a warning sign of potential health problems. Pupils that don’t react together, or don’t react normally to light can be a sign of illness or disease, so always get it checked out.