Is it? I know many people who've wound up in the emergency room with some eye damage. I don't know if these incidents would have significantly damaged my eyes or not, I just know they bounced off the glasses.
I'm quite sure that if any non-vanishingly-small percentage of people had issues with their contacts like that, they would not be ubiquitous like they are.
edit: also wtf why do you know "many" people who've been to the ER with eye damage? I've only ever known that to happen to one person and it was due to a stick going into their eye..
If you think I'm lying about that, you're mistaken. A tiny piece of grit blowing into the window would cause my eyes to squeeze shut from the pain. It was all I could do to open them enough to pull over.
They were hard contacts, which were necessary for my astigmatism. I don't think the soft ones had that problem.
Believe what you want.
> why do you know
People who work with machine tools. A lot of people learn the hard way to use goggles. My incidents were with machine tools and being slapped in the face with thorny blackberry vines I was trying to decimate.
I've had a couple other incidents with power tools where the flying debris didn't hit my face, but if it did, without goggles, there would have been damage. For example, one time my angle grinder disk exploded. Another time my radial arm saw picked up a piece of wood and used it to punch a hole through the wall.
One acquaintance leaned over the car battery to attach jumper cables. The outgassing hydrogen exploded into his face and burned off the top layer of his eyeballs. He spent a week with his eyes bandaged wondering if he was blinded (fortunately, he recovered, but he said the pain was incredible).
Others have had their eyebrows singed from a carburetor backfire.
I didn't mean to imply I thought you were lying; I just don't think it's representative of the rate of that happening, so it's a bit weird to present it as, like, 'what can happen if you wear contacts'.
