Frost Contact
Old and busted: Your breath freezing in cold weather. New hotn- er, coldness: Your contact lenses freezing in even colder weather
Cold winter weather affects the body – YOUR body, not the one in your car trunk – in varied ways, depending on just how cold it is. Throw out the numbers and what have you got?
Most famously, you can see your breath. At the top temp end, it begins with visible fog. It bottoms out with your actual exhalation freezing solid and falling to the ground, as was reportedly the case last week in Snag, Yukon. You read that right, “Snag”… cool name for a really cool place, amiright?
I’m right. At 7:20am on the morning of February 3rd, 1947, the thermometer in Snag dropped to −63.0 °C (−81.4 °F), setting a new North American low temperature record. It’s said that the sounds of people talking and dogs barking 4 miles away at the airport could be heard plainly in the frigid outdoor air, and exhaled breath froze instantly with a hissing sound, falling to the ground as a fine powder.
It didn’t (and doesn’t) get quite that cold here. It’s rare when it’s cold enough to freeze the inside of your nose – a very weird feeling mainly confined to kids playing outside in winter, which was a regular thing before mobile phones put an end to it.
But to the point… it’s been coooold here, especially in the morning when I drive my sone to work. It’s been windy too, driving down the dreaded Wind Chill Factor to regions much more than Minus Zero (shoutout to The Boomtown Rats).
And that’s when I felt it: as I left the house, my contact lenses began fogging in a way they never had fogged before. I’d blink to restore them and they’d fog again, rinse and repeat.
This wasn’t exactly a health crisis or anything… according to the nice folks at Bellalenses, “Contacts Lenses” cannot freeze to one’s eyes since one’s eyes are well above the freezing point. Assuming one’s living, of course, and not some sort of polar zombie – in which case, you’d have other issues to worry about.
(Top image from the 1988 film “Scrooged”, actor pictured is Michael J. Pollard)
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