5 Tips to Make Sure Your Eye Patch Feels Good to Wear While Protecting Your Eye
Whether you wear an eye patch while your eye heals from a procedure, or you’ll need one indefinitely, the last thing you want is to endure constant irritation and discomfort.
An eye patch can be a comfortable accessory to your wardrobe, or it can feel like a collar that’s a little too tight – you just can’t wait to take it off. If you find that you often take off your eye patch to relieve discomfort, it’s not properly serving its purpose.
Here are five tips to building the most comfortable eye patch.
1. Find Your Ideal Eye Patch Thickness
Eye patches come with two choices for curvature: Standard curve and low curve.
The standard curve provides more space behind the patch. The low curve provides less.
Standard curve eye patches are meant to keep you from feeling the patch rubbing against your face or eyes, including your eye lashes. If you have longer lashes, feeling them rub against the patch every time you blink could become annoying and uncomfortable. The standard curve also just gives more room, so more air can flow behind the patch, reducing moisture buildup.
However, if you wear glasses, the standard curve often bumps up against them, making it harder for your glasses to remain properly positioned, and forcing you to constantly adjust them. So, the low curve option reduces the distance between the front of the eye patch and your face, so it can more easily slip behind your glasses.
If you want to wear glasses with your eye patch, you will probably opt for the low curve eye patch for the most comfortable experience.
2. Choose the Best Size for Your Face
For quality eye patches such as those sold by Northwest Eye Design, you can choose from three sizes.
The classic eye patch measures 3.5 inches by 2.25 inches, and it works well for most adult faces. However, everyone’s face is different. Nose size, face width, cheek bones – there are many variations among these and other facial features. The classic patch might be too big for you.
The mini patch reduces the classic down to 3 inches by 2 inches. And referring back to the first tip, both the classic and mini patch come with options for standard or low curve.
If you want an even smaller option, the slim patch reduces the height down to 1.63 inches, keeping the 3 inch width. This option also might work for people who wear glasses but who don’t like the low curve version of the other sizes.
You may want to try on different sizes to figure out which one fits your facial structure best and provides maximum comfort.
3. Consider Your Reason for Needing an Eye Patch
Will you be wearing your eye patch temporarily, for a longer period of time, or indefinitely?
If your eye needs to heal from surgery or another procedure, protecting it from infection is extremely important, as is facilitating the healing process. In this situation, sometimes airflow can speed up the recovery process for your eye.
We offer the Aeropatch for this purpose.
It is a mesh material that allows air to flow through, and gives youlimited visibility as well. But it prevents anyone from seeing through the patch. So you can see out, but they can’t see in.
View the Aeropatch and other eye patch options
If you’re wearing a patch for a longer stretch of time, or if airflow isn’t that important to you, then the comfort of your eye patch will primarily be determined by the material it’s made from. And that’s what tip number 4 is about.
4. Ditch the Plastic and Adhesive – Go with Ultra-Suede for Ultra-Comfort
Adhesive eye patches irritate your skin, and removing them is like peeling tape. Very uncomfortable. Plus, they stick against your eye and offer very little airflow. They also mess up your makeup, if that’s important to you.
Plastic and other materials don’t adapt as well to the shape of your face, can have hard edges that dig into your skin leaving marks, and just don’t feel nice against your skin.
The best and most comfortable eye patch material is ultra-suede. It is soft, machine-washable, and durable. Northwest Eye Design only sells ultra-suede for this reason, other than the Aeropatch. And you can get them in many different colors.
See more eye patch options here
5. Customize the Strap with Velcro
Lastly, making your eye patch comfortable depends on choosing the right strap. An overly tight strap will dig into your head and leave marks. If your strap continually annoys you, we’re back once again to the tight collar. You’ll be more likely to take it off.
But you can’t have a strap that’s too loose or stretches out either. No matter what, with elastic straps you run the risk of having to constantly adjust it and getting distracted by it.
For this reason, our straps are covered with the same ultra-suede material as the eye patches, so the strap feels softer against your skin and doesn’t dig in.
But the surefire way to ensure maximum comfort from your strap is to add on a Velcro attachment. This allows you to customize the fit every time you put on the eye patch.
Bonus: Easy to Wash and Dry
True eye patch comfort goes beyond the wear itself; you should also consider the overall convenience. As with any comfortable accessory to your wardrobe, your eye patch shouldn’t require constant maintenance, break easily, or come with complicated instructions.
Look for patches that can be cleaned in a washing machine with your normal laundry or quickly hand washed. Some patches may be too delicate for this or might require specific chemicals or processes for proper care. The added burden of difficult eye patch cleaning is simply unnecessary.
All of the eye patches at Northwest Eye Design are machine washable.
Maximum Eye Patch Comfort
Ultra-soft ultra-suede, customizable strap size, the right shape and size for your face and personal preferences – these are the keys to making your eye patch as comfortable as it can be.
Please reach out to us if you have any additional questions about eye patches.
