According to a small new study, wearing contact lenses may change the community of bacteria living in your eyes. In the study, researchers found, the surface of the eye in the people who wore contact lenses had triple the proportion of certain bacteria species, on average, compared with the people in the study who did not wear the lenses.
Moreover, the researchers found differences in the composition of the bacterial community on the surface of people's eyes. In the people who wore contact lenses, this composition more closely resembled the bacteria on the individuals' eyelids, as compared to the nonwearers.