Floaters: the dots that drift across your vision

Floaters are the specks, threads and cobwebs that drift across your vision, most obvious against a blank wall or a bright sky. Most people have them, most of the time they mean nothing, and occasionally they are the most urgent eye symptom there is.

What floaters actually are

The back two-thirds of your eye is filled with a clear gel called the vitreous. When you are young it is uniform. Over time it liquefies in places and the collagen fibres in it clump together.

Those clumps float in the gel and cast shadows on your retina. What you are seeing is not something on the surface of your eye, which is why blinking and rubbing do nothing. You are seeing a shadow from inside.

They drift when you move your eye and then keep drifting for a moment after you stop, because the gel carries on moving. That lagging motion is the classic sign of a floater rather than something on the lens of your glasses.

They are most visible against a bright plain background, partly because of contrast and partly because bright light constricts your pupil, which sharpens the shadow.

The harmless kind

Floaters you have had for months or years, that change slowly or not at all, are almost always harmless. They become more common with age, and earlier if you are short-sighted, because a longer eye stretches the vitreous.

The good news is that your brain gradually stops reporting them. The floater does not go away; your attention does. This is why people who found them maddening at first often forget about them entirely within a year.

What helps that process is not staring at them. Chasing a floater with your eye moves the gel and keeps it in view, which is the opposite of what you want.

The kind that is an emergency

Go to an eye hospital the same day, not to an optical shop, if any of these happen.

A sudden shower of many new floaters, often described as soot, pepper or a swarm, appearing over hours rather than years.

Flashes of light, particularly in the corner of your vision, like a camera flash or lightning that is not there.

A dark curtain, shadow or veil moving in from the edge of your vision.

A sudden drop in vision in one eye.

Those can mean the vitreous is pulling away from the retina and has torn it. A tear can progress to a retinal detachment, which threatens permanent sight loss and is treatable if caught early. Hours matter here in a way they rarely do with eyes.

This is not something we can assess at either showroom, and we will tell you so and send you on rather than testing your prescription. Our note on how often adults need an eye test lists the other symptoms that skip the optician entirely.

What does not work

No eye drop dissolves floaters. No vitamin, supplement or eye exercise removes them. Anything sold on that promise is selling you nothing, and this is a common enough claim to be worth naming.

Surgical options exist. A vitrectomy removes the gel entirely and a laser can break up large floaters, but both carry genuine risk including cataract and retinal detachment. They are reserved for cases where floaters seriously interfere with vision, and for ordinary ones the honest medical answer is to leave them alone.

When to mention them

Bring floaters up at your next eye test even if they are old and stable, so there is a baseline. If you are short-sighted, over 50, have had eye surgery, or have diabetes, mention them specifically, because all four raise the risk of a retinal problem.

The test is free at both showrooms, Pulchowk in Lalitpur and Boudha in Kathmandu, and takes about ten minutes. Cataract signs people mistake for dirty glasses covers the other slow change worth reporting, and frames start at NPR 999 if a prescription change is what turns up.

Living with the ordinary kind

Two habits help while your brain adapts. Do not chase them with your eyes, because following a floater keeps it in view and reinforces the attention loop you want to break. And expect them to be most obvious in the situations you cannot avoid, a white wall or a bright sky, rather than concluding they are getting worse.

What is worth doing is noticing a change. A slow increase over years is expected. A step change over a day is not.