What is an Implantable Contact Lens (ICL)?
The Collamer ICLTM is an extra lens, similar to a contact lens. The difference is that the ICL is placed inside your eye, rather than on the surface of your eye. The lens is soft and tiny, much like your natural lens, but does not replace it. The ICL is specially shaped to correct nearsightedness and farsightedness. The Toric ICLTM also corrects nearsightedness with astigmatism. The lens works by changing the way light is focused on the retina.

How is it put into my eye?
Because the ICL is tiny and soft, it can be folded up so small that it can be injected into your eye in seconds through a tiny hole underneath your eyelid. Once injected, the ICL unfolds into position in the liquid between your iris and your natural lens - and there it stays, correcting your eyesight without any further treatment being necessary (the ICL can also be removed or replaced, if required, in another simple procedure).

What is made of?
The ICL is made of a unique material called Collamer®. Collamer has a number of spezial qualities, the most important being that it is accepted by your body as not being a 'foreign tissue'. This means that your body happily accepts it without reacting to it and trying to attack or reject it. Other special features of Collamer are its optical clarity and the flexibility and elasticity that allow it to be folded up and then to recover its correct shape in the liquid inside your eye.

What are the advantages of the Implantable Contact Lens?

Unlike laser vision correction, the ICL is removable
The Collamer ICL TM is capable of correcting near and farsightedness and astigmatism with extreme precision. Since the lens does not permanently alter any structures within the eye or on the cornea, it can easily be removed if necessary.

The ICL is invisible
The ICL is invisible and undetectable – the only way that you, or any one else, will know you have had ICL treatment is the improvement in your eyesight!

ICL works beyond the limits of laser treatment
If you need a lot of vision correction because you are strongly near- or farsighted, the ICL can do the job without an increased chance of problems.
ICL treatment is completely unaffected if you have thin corneas, dry eyes, or large pupils, as it does not involve removing tissue from your cornea.

The STAAR® Surgical ICL – established technology, tried and tested worldwide
The Implantable Contact Lens from STAAR® Surgical is the first such product to be approved, and is the result of many years of research and development into adapting the proven technology of the IOL (intra-ocular lens) which is the standard treatment for the common condition of cataract. Intra-ocular lenses are used on millions of patients every year as a replacement for the eye's natural lens when it becomes less clear through age or deterioration. Unlike the intra-ocular lens, however, the ICL does not require removal of your natural lens - it is placed in front of the natural lens and works with it to give you correct vision.

The ICL is a triumph of innovation, engineering and clinical research that has undergone many years of testing and evaluation in thousands of patients worldwide before recently becoming available for general use. Developed by STAAR Surgical Company, a company with a long history of successful innovations in ophthalmic surgical technologies, the ICL requires no maintenance and leaves all the delicate optical structures and tissues of the eye intact. Tests have demonstrated that the ICL provides the best postoperative quality of vision of all refractive (vision-correcting) procedures available, and that patients report a very high level of satisfaction with their ICL treatment.

The perfect solution for all types of vision correction…
Because each person's eyes are different, your physician must choose the best treatment for your specific disorder The ICL is capable of correcting the most common vision disorders as well as those disorders where conventional laser treatment may not be advisable. Those conditions may include:

If you are too near-sighted or too farsighted
Because laser treatment would need to make a larger correction, there would be more chance of treatment problems or less-perfect correction of your vision.

If you have a thin cornea
The cornea is the curved surface of the front of your eye that laser treatment can reshape by removing tissue. If it is naturally thin, there may not be enough to safely remove the amount needed to fully correct your vision.

If you have dry eyes
Because laser treatment can lead to dryer eyes, your surgeon may be unwilling to consider laser surgery if you already have a history of dry eyes.

If you have large pupils
The pupill is the ’black’ circle at the center of your coloured iris through which the light passes into your eye – it continually adjusts in size to let more or less light through in darker or lighter conditions. Patients who have naturally very large pupils may be unsuitable for laser treatment because the area of tissue removal from the cornea would not be as big as their pupil in darker conditions.

The Collamer ICL™ produces superb optical results
Because the Collamer ICL produces highly accurate vision correction without removing tissue from your eye, the quality of vision can be even better than that produced by laser treatment - it is not affected by the variability of corneal shape that can occur after recovery from laser removal of tissue..