And now, with even bifocal contact lenses, maybe we do have a chance to look healthier.

Until now, wearing bifocal contact lenses has called for dedication on the part of patients.

What is more, bifocal contact lenses can be expensive.

If bifocal contact lenses will not work for you, your doctor may recommend monovision.

A22 A race to make bifocal contact lenses is heating up as manufacturers see the approach of a giant market: the aging baby boom generation.

Bifocal contact lenses have been developed for people who have both nearsightedness and presbyopia.

Nowhere is the competition more apparent than in the industrywide race to fit 30 million aging baby boomers with bifocal contact lenses.

More recently, robust studies on children have shown orthokeratology and centre distance bifocal contact lenses may arrest myopic development.

Disposable lenses, bifocal contact lenses and gas-permeable lenses are also being adopted by athletes.

Bausch & Lomb, which already makes two types of bifocal contact lenses, said it expected to add a third later this year and a fourth in 1990.

Another rigid bifocal contact lens was recently introduced by Fused Kontact Inc., based in Chicago.

The newest wrinkle is the bifocal contact lens, meant primarily for people over 40 who need correction for distance and a different lens for closer vision.

So when she needed bifocal contact lenses before a concert in Italy, she showed her card from a company called Medisavers to a participating Manhattan optometrist.

Advertising for products from bifocal contact lenses to Viagra attests to how the graying of America is forcing manufacturers and retailers to shift away from an obsession with youth.

Several companies are racing to develop new types of bifocal contact lenses as the postwar baby boom generation advances into the years when an eye doctor is likely to suggest bifocal eyeglasses.

SOLA/ Barnes said it expected Food and Drug Administration approval later this year for a second bifocal contact lens - also a diffractive type, which is already on the market in Britain.

And as their future becomes their now, the older boomers are beginning to gray and wrinkle, to wear bifocal contact lenses, to marvel at how young the police are - and to discover that while many of them will live long, few will prosper.

"The industry has been working on bifocal contact lenses for two decades and no one item has surfaced as being significantly better than another one," said Dr. Arthur Giroux, director of the contact lens section of the American Optometric Association, a professional group in Alexandria, Va.