Snorkeling
Can you snorkel with contacts? Yes, with caveats
Plenty of people snorkel in contact lenses and nothing goes wrong. The official guidance is stricter than that, and worth reading before your trip. Here is what the FDA and CDC say, which lenses to wear, and the one habit that keeps a lens in your eye.
On this page
Yes. You can snorkel in contact lenses, and an enormous number of people do it every summer with no consequences at all.
I do it myself some of the time. I also want to give you the stricter version. The people who regulate contact lenses take a harder line than any snorkelling page I have read, and you should hear that from someone who is not selling you a mask.
What the FDA and CDC actually say
The FDA does not say be careful. It says do not expose your contact lenses to any water, listing tap, bottled, distilled, lake and ocean water, and to take your lenses out before you swim1. The CDC gives the same advice, and so does the American Optometric Association23.
Behind that sits one specific infection. Water exposure has been linked to Acanthamoeba keratitis, an infection of the cornea that is painful, stubbornly hard to treat, and in rare cases ends in a corneal transplant or permanent vision loss1. It is uncommon. It is also serious enough that the guidance is categorical instead of balanced. I think that is the right call for a regulator, even though almost nobody follows it to the letter.
The most useful line in the whole of the FDA’s guidance is the practical one: if your lenses have been submerged while swimming, throw them away and replace them with a new pair1.
Where I have landed on it
I wear contacts some days and a prescription mask on others. That has meant making my own peace with the gap between the official advice and what the entire snorkelling world actually does.
Where I have ended up is that the guidance is right about the mechanism and pitched at everybody, including the person rinsing a monthly lens under a hotel tap and putting it back in. That case is genuinely risky. Wearing a fresh daily disposable in clean seawater for forty minutes and binning it afterwards is a much smaller exposure, and it is the version I am comfortable with.
That is a personal judgement and not advice, and I would sooner say so plainly than dress it up. Whether contacts make sense for your eyes depends on your lens type, your prescription and your history, and the person who prescribed them is the one to ask. Do it before you travel.
Soft lenses only, and why rigid ones fail in six feet of water
Lens type matters more here than anything else on this page.
Soft daily disposables win twice over. They are physically bigger and cling more readily to the eye, so they are less likely to wash out when a mask floods4. And they cost so little that binning a submerged lens is easy instead of annoying, which is what makes the FDA’s advice something you might actually follow.
Hard and rigid gas-permeable lenses should stay in the hotel room. Divers Alert Network notes that rigid and gas-permeable lenses have been found to cause eye pain and blurred vision during and after dives, because gas bubbles form between the cornea and the lens5.
There is a measurement behind that, and the depth involved is shallower than most people assume. A 1988 hyperbaric study exposed three rigid lens materials to a range of dive profiles and found bubbles under all of them, at simulated depths as shallow as 1.98m, about six and a half feet6. The authors concluded the bubbles most likely came out of the tear layer rather than the eye’s own tissue.
Six feet is not diving. It is a duck-dive to get a closer look at something on the bottom, which is exactly what you will do about nine times on a good snorkel. So this applies to you even if you never put a tank on.
One smaller thing in the same territory: soft lenses can stick to the eye after pressure changes, so rewetting drops earn their place in the bag4.
The habit that keeps a lens in your eye
If you take one thing from this page, take this. When your mask floods, keep your eyes shut. Get your head up, clear the mask, and open your eyes only when it is sealed and clear again.
The instinct runs the other way. Water arrives, you open your eyes and blink to work out what is happening, and that is the moment a lens leaves. Instructors teach the same discipline for mask-removal drills: eyes closed through anything that floods or removes the mask4.
I made it automatic by rehearsing it once, standing in waist-deep water and flooding the mask on purpose. Doing it deliberately, when nothing is at stake, is worth far more than reading about it. Ten seconds of feeling slightly silly in the shallows buys you a reflex you will never have to think about again.
What I actually pack
The list is unglamorous and it is most of what separates a non-event from a ruined afternoon.
Daily disposables, because I will not hesitate to bin them. A spare pair in the dry bag, two if I am snorkelling on consecutive days, because that single item turns a lost lens into a minor inconvenience. Rewetting drops. A photo of my prescription on my phone, which makes replacing a lens in an unfamiliar pharmacy enormously easier. And bottled or sterile saline for my hands, never the sea and never the tap in a rental.
There is one thing deliberately missing from that list: anything for rinsing a lens that has been in the water. The guidance is to replace it, not clean it, and at the price of a daily disposable there is no argument to have.
Risk in proportion
Not all water is equivalent, and pretending otherwise is how sensible advice gets ignored wholesale.
The higher-risk end is fresh and warm still water: lakes, ponds, rivers, warm pools and hot tubs. That is where the organisms behind the worst outcomes live. Tap water belongs in the same category, which is why the guidance covers rinsing lenses at home as well as swimming in a lake.
Clean, moving, open seawater sits at the other end. Salinity and dilution are not sterilisation, and the advice still applies. But a reef swim in clear ocean is not the same exposure as a warm freshwater lake in August, and I make different choices about the two.
For what it is worth, my own reason for drifting toward a prescription mask had nothing to do with infection. It was that a flooded mask in contacts is a small problem to be managed, and after enough boat trips I found the background awareness of it more tiring than I expected. If that trade-off sounds familiar, our guide to snorkeling with glasses puts the costs and the break-even side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
Can you snorkel with contact lenses?
Physically, yes, and a great many people do it every year without incident. The FDA and CDC both advise removing lenses before you swim and keeping them away from water entirely, because of a small risk of serious infection. If you wear them anyway, use soft daily disposables and throw them out after the swim.
Which contact lenses are best for snorkeling?
Soft daily disposables. They are larger than rigid lenses and cling better, so they are less likely to wash out of a flooded mask, and a lost one costs you pennies. Hard and gas-permeable lenses should stay at home.
What should I do if my mask floods while wearing contacts?
Keep your eyes shut. Get your head up, clear the mask, and only open your eyes once it is sealed and clear again. The instinct is to open and blink, which is how most lenses get lost.
Can you lose a contact lens while snorkeling?
Yes, usually by opening your eyes inside a flooded mask. A mask that seals properly and the eyes-shut habit between them make it unlikely. A spare pair in your bag turns it into a two-minute problem.
Is snorkeling in contacts safe in the sea?
Clean, moving open seawater sits at the lower-risk end. Warm still freshwater, lakes, ponds, pools and hot tubs are the real concern. None of it is zero risk, which is why the medical advice is to keep water off lenses altogether.
Should I talk to my optometrist before a snorkeling trip?
Yes, and do it before you travel. Whether contacts are sensible for you depends on your eyes, your lens type and your history, and that is a two-minute conversation with the person who prescribed them.
References
Footnotes
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“Contact Lens Risks.” U.S. Food and Drug Administration, fda.gov. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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“Healthy Habits: Keeping Water Away from Contact Lenses.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cdc.gov. ↩
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“Scuba Diving If You Wear Contacts or Glasses.” PADI Blog, blog.padi.com. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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“High-Pressure Ophthalmology.” Divers Alert Network, dan.org. ↩
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Socks, J. F., J. F. Molinari and J. L. Rowey. “Rigid gas permeable contact lenses in hyperbaric environments.” American Journal of Optometry and Physiological Optics, vol. 65, no. 12, Dec. 1988, pp. 942–5. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. ↩
Further reading
- FDA — Contact Lens Risks
- CDC — Keeping Water Away from Contact Lenses
- American Optometric Association — contact lenses and environments
- Divers Alert Network — High-Pressure Ophthalmology
- Socks, Molinari & Rowey (1988) — rigid gas permeable lenses in hyperbaric environments
- PADI — scuba diving if you wear contacts or glasses
Greg Eisman — Contributor
Greg wears contacts some days and a prescription mask on others, having worked through most of the alternatives. He snorkels on holiday rather than for a living.
