According to this, no. But I don’t believe it. I’ve worn contact lenses for nearly twenty years and I do it all the time. But I wear gas permeable rigid contacts and you can do almost anything with those. I’m not sure if you should use your saliva with soft lenses. My wife wears those and they are a lot more fragile.

Yuck. I’m sorry but, yuck. Back in 10th grade biology class, I had the honor of looking up close and personal at my own saliva…and I still have nightmares from that little experience. Help me if I ever use saliva on my contacts or glasses. In my case at least, there is no way saliva could make lenses clean. Clean and saliva are practically opposites.

But I suppose any method in a sandstorm is justified…

I’ve done it before, no harm yet.

Personally, I would be worried about putting gross germs in my eyes.

@MissAnthrope Thanks. That’s the crucial part I left out.

I did it for years. Tears take care of many germs.

If you don’t have contact solution with you, you’ll do anything to get the thing that’s killing your eye off your contact. Spit works. It may sound gross but it’s my spit and it’s hung out in my mouth for a long time now. It’s not like I’d use other people’s spit – that would be the gross situation. I put my contact between the end of my tongue and the top of my mouth and rub it, and low and behold, the irritating thing is gone. I’ve had soft contacts for over 30 years and it’s worked many, many times. No blindness, no infections. It actually works a lot better than water. I’ve had to keep them in water overnight just to keep them from drying out when I unexpectedly had to stay somewhere, and they were dirty and dry in my eyes.

Add 1 tsp of salt to 1 cup of water and you have saline- better for your lenses.

@faye, makes sense. I’ll try that next time I get stuck somewhere without solution.

I guess it would be ok, but probably only in a desperate situation…