If you’re the type who’s always on the hunt for a fun, new way to experiment with your look, colored contacts can offer a dramatic change.
The eye trend has been popping up among celebrities like Selena Gomez, who chose to switch up her natural dark brown color for a blueish grey hue at this year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. But is wearing colored contacts safe, especially given all of the contact lens horror stories that have been circulating lately? We got the experts to weigh in on how you can pull them off—without hurting your eyes.
Go to a professional
The real trouble with color contacts starts when you look outside your eye doctor for your colored contacts, Dr. Steven Shanbom, an ophthalmologist in Berkley, Michigan tells Health. “You should be considering your colored contact a medical device, not a toy.” And yes, even if you don’t normally wear corrective lenses, you still need a professional fitting.
What could go wrong?
“If you have a contact that is too tight or the curvature it too short, it can stick and hold up the eye and slowly cause an abrasion or irritation,” Dr. Shanbom said. “That’s a spot for bacteria to come in and cause an infection.”
While it is possible to order colored contacts online or pick them up at certain convenience stores, Shanbom warned that any brand that doesn’t require a valid prescription shouldn’t be trusted.
“If you see an eye care professional to be fitted, you are going to get a safe product,” he explained.
The problem with these unverified brands is that they are made to be one-size-fits-all, but all corneas are not equal. Just like your feet require the correct shoe size, your eyeball needs a lens that fits. By wearing contacts that don’t correctly fit your eye you run the risk of irritation, infection, and even blindness if you get an infection that gets out of control.
Luckily, many name brands are jumping on the color changing bandwagon if you have a valid prescription. Options range from ACUVES 1-Day Define lens (for as low as $65 for a month’s supply), which subtly brightens your eyes natural color with colored enhancements, to Alcon AIR OPTIX COLORS ($80 for a three-month supply, airoptixcolors.com), which allows you to chose between 9 color options for daily wear up to 30 days.
Take good care of them
Just like prescription lenses, you’re not off the hook once you’ve gotten fitted by a pro and purchased from a reputable brand. It is still up to you to properly care for your contacts.
Depending on how they’re labeled, the lens should be always be discarded after a certain amount of time and replaced with a fresh lens. And you should never be cleaning your lenses with anything other than cleans hands and a sterile solution.
“That’s the same whether you have a colored contact or a clear lens,” Shanbom said.
The good news is that if you follow these precautions, it’s relatively safe to wear colored contacts for cosmetic sake. According to Shanbom, “if you wear them properly, I don’t see where it’s a undue risk to want to change your eye color.”
Pregnancy rumors are swirling around one of the world’s few pink bottlenose dolphins.
Affectionately named Pinky, the blush-colored creature was first spotted in 2007 in Louisiana’s Calcasieu Lake by charter boat captain Erik Rue.
“It was absolutely, stunningly pink,” Rue said in a 2009 interview. “I had never seen anything like it. It’s the same color throughout the whole body. It looks like it just came out of a paint booth.”
In the eight years that have since passed, Pinky has been spotted on multiple occasions,according to WGNO. It was only recently, however, that Rue said he witnessed Pinky engaging in mating behavior:
It’s unclear exactly why Pinky is so brilliantly pink. Many believe that the dolphin is an albino, only 14 of which have been reported worldwide, according to the Washington Examiner. Some conflicting reports, however, suggest that she suffers from a genetic disorder.
Two other dolphin species — the Chinese white dolphin (Sousa chinensis) and the Amazon river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) — are colloquially known as pink dolphins, although neither species is quite as stunningly pink-hued as Pinky.
Cosplayers and cosplay for your enjoyment! A shout out to all the cosplayers around the world who work hard to come up with such great outfits of their favorite characters.
Fantasy Grounds, one of the leading virtual tabletop platforms, now offers officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons content from Wizards of the Coast. Available through Steam, the software can allow players to virtually recreate the 5th edition D&D tabletop experience complete with dice rolling, 2D maps and a play experience completely controlled by a dungeon master.
Anyone who’s been playing D&D over the last decade remembers the promise of Wizard’s Virtual Table. First publicized in the back pages of 4th edition core rulebooks, it promised a fully-realized, 3D tabletop roleplaying experience. But over the lifecycle of 4th edition the vision wavered, and in 2012 the Virtual Table beta was officially cancelled.
In the meantime, a number of virtual tabletop solutions cropped up organically online, allowing players to come together from remote locations around the world and have an experience very similar to playing at a table together in the same room.
One of the most capable solutions is Fantasy Grounds, which has a bewildering assortment of features and flexibilities that allow game masters to create everything from homebrew games, to Pathfinder and other established tabletop systems. Add to that the officially licensed D&D modules available for download, including add-on classes and monster collections, as well as entire campaigns.
The first set of products, including the D&D Complete Core Class Pack, D&D Complete Core Monster Pack, and The Lost Mine of Phandelver went on sale last week. Polygon has spent some time checking out the content in The Lost Mine module. Believe it or not, the entire experience, page-for-page, of the physical 5th edition D&D Starter Set is represented there. Beyond that, Fantasy Ground’s modules even include annotated maps hotlinked to spawn enemies onto the grid, ready to roll initiative.
We talked to the president and owner of Fantasy Grounds, Doug Davison, who said that more products are already in the pipeline.
“We have a queue that we’re working through right now,” Davison told Polygon. “We just finished up the preliminary work on the Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure module, and so that’s currently in review right now. We’ve already conducted our internal reviews, and now it’s out in the hands of a few folks at Wizards of the Coast. So depending on how much needs to be changed during that process, I think you’re looking at a matter of maybe weeks before that’s available.”
Greg Tito, Wizard’s communications manager, confirmed for Polygon that other campaigns, including Rise of Tiamat and the recently released Princes of the Apocalypse, are on the way for Fantasy Grounds.
It’s interesting that Wizards is partnering with a tool which, for all intents and purposes, allows users to scrape content off the internet for free and easily insert it into their games. Fantasy Grounds’ own online tutorials give step-by-step instructions on how to grab maps and art from Google Images and drop it directly into user-generated games.
But Tito says players have been doing this sort of thing for generations, so why not support a tool that lets them do it easily? Furthermore, he hopes that fans will see the value in the for-pay Fantasy Grounds modules, as they leverage the strong work that the Wizards research and development team, as well as their publishing partners, produce in the physical books.
“It goes down to everything that we’ve been excited about in this partnership withFantasy Grounds,” Tito said. “It’s just another tool to allow people to play D&D the way they want to play it.”
Enhanced training through NeurostimulationPlay!04:55
00:0504:56
Link to video here – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/03/01/scientists-discover-how-to-download-knowledge-to-your-brain/
Researchers claim to have developed a simulator which can feed information directly into a person’s brain and teach them new skills in a shorter amount of time, comparing it to “life imitating art”.
They believe it could be the first steps in developing advanced software that will make Matrix-style instant learning a reality.
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Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 