The EVO ICL, from the maker down — one company, one material, two current models
Manufacturer and regulatory facts researched August 2026 · Prices researched July 2026 · Published 30 August 2026
The EVO ICL is built by STAAR Surgical of Lake Forest, California, from a proprietary material called Collamer, in two current designs: the EVO and the larger-optic EVO+. There is no second manufacturer. The detail that matters most to anyone considering surgery in China, and that we have not seen stated on a clinic page: the lenses implanted in China are manufactured in Nidau, Switzerland, on a line the company says is now dedicated to Chinese supply — and China received the EVO+ in November 2025.
Almost everything written about the ICL is written about the operation. This page is about the object. That turns out to be the more useful half for a patient comparing countries, because the operation varies enormously between surgeons and the object does not vary at all: it is the same implant, from the same factory, in Shanghai and in Los Angeles. Understanding what it is made of and which version exists tells you which questions about a destination are worth asking — and, just as usefully, which ones are noise.
The manufacturer: a single-source implant, which is rare
STAAR Surgical has done nothing but ophthalmic surgery since 1982 and has been designing and building implantable Collamer lenses for around three decades. In its March 2026 shareholder letter the company described itself as the global leader in phakic intraocular lenses and put its cumulative figure at more than four million ICLs sold in over 85 countries. For scale on how recently that curve steepened, STAAR publicly marked its two-million milestone in 2022. The company also estimates the EVO ICL now accounts for roughly 12% of refractive surgeries globally, while laser procedures that remove corneal tissue have trended down over the same period.
Single-source supply is unusual in this field, and it changes the shape of the decision. With laser vision correction you are, in part, comparing hardware: whether a centre runs a current ZEISS VisuMax for SMILE, which excimer platform it uses for LASIK, how old the machine is. That comparison is real, and our SMILE pro and VisuMax 800 page exists because of it. With an ICL there is nothing equivalent to compare. Every centre on earth implants the same lens. What you are actually choosing is a surgeon, a measurement protocol and a follow-up plan — which is a harder comparison to make from a website and a more honest one to make at all.
Collamer: what is actually going into your eye
The material is the company's central claim and its patent moat, and the name is simply collagen plus polymer. As described in the published material literature, the composition is:
| Component | Approx. proportion | What it is doing |
|---|---|---|
| Poly-HEMA | ~60% | The structural polymer — the same hydrophilic family used in soft contact lenses, which is why the lens is flexible enough to be folded through a small incision. |
| Water | ~36% | Bound within the hydrogel. A high water content is what makes the material behave as a soft, hydrated implant rather than a rigid one. |
| Benzophenone | ~3.8% | An ultraviolet absorber. The lens filters UV before it reaches the natural crystalline lens and retina. |
| Purified porcine collagen | ~0.2% | The fraction the material is named for. It is understood to be why the surface is passively tolerated inside the eye rather than provoking a foreign-body response. |
Composition as published in the ophthalmic material literature, researched August 2026. Confirm the current specification for the exact lens you are offered with your surgeon.
The 0.2% that most explainers leave out
That last row is a fraction of a percent by mass and it is the row we get asked about. The collagen in Collamer is porcine in origin — derived from pigs. It is present in a very small proportion and it is purified, but it is present, and a patient is entitled to know that before a permanent implant rather than after.
This matters practically rather than abstractly. A substantial share of the international patients who travel for refractive surgery come from the Gulf and the wider Muslim world, and observant Jewish, Hindu and vegetarian patients ask the same question for their own reasons. Rulings on medical implants containing trace porcine-derived material differ between religious authorities, and several traditions treat medically necessary or transformed material differently from dietary material — but that is a question for your own authority, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or offer you a ruling dressed up as reassurance. What we would say is procedural: raise it early, ask your surgeon to confirm the material specification in writing, and note that the laser alternatives — SMILE, LASIK and TransPRK — implant nothing at all, which for some patients resolves the question rather than answering it.
The hole in the middle, and the appointment it deleted
Look at a photograph of an EVO ICL and there is a small opening through the centre of the optic. That is the KS-AquaPORT, 0.36 mm across, and it is the change that separates the EVO generation from everything STAAR built before it.
The problem it solves is plumbing. Aqueous fluid is produced behind the iris and has to flow forward through the pupil to drain at the angle. An earlier-generation ICL sat in that path and obstructed it, so surgeons had to open an alternative route in advance — a peripheral iridotomy, usually a YAG laser procedure at a separate appointment days or weeks before implantation, or a surgical iridectomy performed during it. The central port lets fluid pass through the lens itself, and the pre-operative procedure went away with it.
For a domestic patient that is a convenience. For a medical traveller it is structural: an entire pre-operative laser appointment, with its own scheduling and its own small risk set, disappeared from the front of the itinerary. It is a large part of why an ICL trip to China now fits inside 6–7 days rather than requiring two visits. The port is also why vault tolerances on modern lenses are read against a different standard than on pre-EVO designs, which is a subject in its own right on the vault page.
EVO or EVO+ — the only model question there is
The two current designs appear in the peer-reviewed comparison literature as V4c and V5, and commercially as EVO and EVO+. The difference is the optical zone. Everything else — the material, the port, the incision, the operation — is common to both.
| EVO (V4c) | EVO+ (V5) | |
|---|---|---|
| Optic zone | Standard | Enlarged, up to about 6.10 mm |
| Central port | 0.36 mm KS-AquaPORT | 0.36 mm KS-AquaPORT |
| Distance acuity in head-to-head study | No significant difference between the two, uncorrected or corrected | |
| Night vision | Reference | Patients reported better night vision in the V5 eye; possible advantage in reducing night-vision disturbance |
| Who it plausibly favours | Small scotopic pupils, moderate corrections | Large scotopic pupils, higher corrections, night-driving demands |
| Available in China | Long established | Since November 2025 — confirm stock with the hospital |
Acuity and night-vision findings as reported in a prospective randomised multicentre contralateral-eye comparison of the two models; availability dates from the manufacturer's own disclosures. Researched August 2026.
The study design behind those two rows deserves a sentence, because it is unusually strong for a device comparison. It was contralateral: each participant received one model in one eye and the other model in the fellow eye, so every patient served as their own control and the usual confounders — age, prescription, healing, motivation, surgeon — cancel out within the subject. When that design reports no acuity difference and a subjective night-vision difference, both halves of that finding carry weight.
What it does not license is a patient walking into a consultation and requesting a model. The larger optic is an advantage where a dilated pupil would otherwise reach past the edge of the lens, and it is close to irrelevant where it would not; and optic diameter is only one of several variables the surgeon is balancing against your anterior-chamber depth and sulcus dimensions. Bring the question. Do not bring the answer. Which lens suits your eye is determined by the operating surgeon from your own pupillometry and imaging.
The supply chain nobody puts on a clinic page
Here is the section we built this page for. If you are weighing surgery in China, somewhere in the back of your mind is a question about whether the implant is the same one you would get at home. The manufacturer has answered it in public, in writing, and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes.
| Date | What the manufacturer disclosed |
|---|---|
| 2006 | STAAR receives approval to market the Visian ICL in China. Two decades of regulated presence follow. |
| 2024–25 | Chinese demand weakens and distributor inventory builds up. STAAR deliberately pauses shipments to China to normalise the channel. By late 2025 distributor stock has fallen below contractual levels and procedure volumes are recovering. |
| 2025 | The company's plant in Nidau, Switzerland begins commercial production, accelerated in response to tariff exposure. |
| Mid-2025 | EVO+ receives Chinese regulatory approval. |
| November 2025 | First EVO+ shipments arrive in China from Switzerland. The company reports early demand exceeding expectations. |
| March 2026 | STAAR states the Nidau facility is now focused exclusively on building EVO and EVO+ for China, and reiterates that China is its largest market. |
Compiled from the manufacturer's own public disclosures, read August 2026. Company statements about its own commercial position are reported here as such.
Three things follow, and they run against the intuition people usually arrive with.
First, the lens implanted in China is not made in China. It is built in Switzerland, on a line the manufacturer says currently serves that market alone. What the Chinese hospital contributes is the surgeon, the theatre, the imaging and the follow-up — which is precisely the half where the country's highest-volume refractive centres have an argument, and precisely the half a website cannot verify for you.
Second, China is not a late market for this product — it is the largest one. That is the manufacturer's own characterisation, and it is the mechanism behind a claim we make elsewhere on this site and are often asked to justify: that surgeons at China's busiest centres run ICL volumes most Western clinics never approach. Volume follows the market, and the market is here. It is worth pairing that with the company's other observation, that refractive-surgery penetration in China remains below many developed markets despite one of the world's highest myopia rates — the volume comes from population scale, not from saturation.
Third, availability has a date on it, and dates are checkable. The EVO+ has been in China since November 2025. That is recent enough that stock is a fair question to put to a specific hospital rather than an assumption to make about the country — and the 2024–25 shipment pause is a reminder that supply into any market moves for commercial reasons that have nothing to do with your eye. Ask which model the centre proposes for you and whether it is on the shelf in your power and size. A centre that answers precisely is telling you something about how it runs.
Two numbers on every lens: power and length
An ICL is specified twice over. The dioptric power corrects your refraction. The overall length decides whether the lens fits the space behind your iris — the ciliary sulcus — and it is chosen from measurements, not from your prescription. The toric range is built in overall lengths of 12.1, 12.6, 13.2 and 13.7 mm.
Sizing is where the real craft sits. Surgeons work from anterior-segment measurements — horizontal white-to-white, anterior chamber depth, and increasingly a direct sulcus-to-sulcus reading taken from ultrasound biomicroscopy — fed through one of several published sizing formulas. Get it short and the lens sits low against your natural crystalline lens; get it long and it arches too far forward into the drainage angle. Both consequences, and the ladder of responses to them, are the subject of the vault page; the reason your endothelium is counted before and after is on the endothelial cell count page.
The scheduling consequence is the one to plan around. Because the lens is specified to your eye in two dimensions rather than one, the required combination of power and length may or may not be on the hospital's shelf, and if it is not, it is ordered. That is the structural reason an ICL trip is a 6–7 day itinerary while a laser trip can be shorter, and the strongest practical argument for sending your prescription and any existing anterior-chamber measurements before you fly rather than presenting them at the desk. Sizing, and the selection of any particular lens, is determined by the operating surgeon.
What the brand does not tell you
A page about a manufacturer should end by saying what the manufacturer is not responsible for. Because there is one maker and one material, the implant is the constant across every ICL patient in the world — and a constant cannot be the variable that explains why one patient's result differs from another's.
The variables are all downstream of the box. Whether your anterior-segment measurements were taken carefully and on a device suited to the job. Whether the size was chosen well from them. Whether your candidacy was assessed honestly or accommodated because you had already booked flights. The surgeon's volume and technique. Whether anyone trends your vault, your intraocular pressure and your endothelial cell count in the years afterwards, and whether you left with the English-language records that make that possible — the records-to-carry-home list covers the set. Those are the comparisons worth making between destinations. The name on the lens is the one item already identical everywhere.
Questions people actually ask
Who makes the EVO ICL, and is there more than one manufacturer?
There is one manufacturer. The EVO ICL is made by STAAR Surgical, a company headquartered in Lake Forest, California that has worked exclusively in ophthalmic surgery since 1982 and has built implantable Collamer lenses for around three decades. In its March 2026 shareholder letter STAAR described itself as the global leader in phakic intraocular lenses and reported more than four million ICLs sold across over 85 countries — against a two-million milestone the company announced in 2022, which gives you the trajectory. This single-source position is unusual in refractive surgery and it has a practical consequence for medical travel: unlike LASIK and SMILE, where clinics compete partly on which laser platform they bought, an ICL patient is choosing a surgeon, a hospital and a sizing workup, not a brand of implant. Every EVO ICL in the world comes from the same maker, in one of two current models.
What is Collamer actually made of, and does it contain animal material?
Collamer is STAAR's proprietary lens material, and the name is a contraction of collagen and polymer. As described in the published material literature it is roughly 60% poly-HEMA — the same family of hydrophilic polymer used in soft contact lenses — with about 36% water content, around 3.8% benzophenone acting as an ultraviolet filter, and approximately 0.2% purified porcine collagen. That last fraction is small, but it is the part people are entitled to know about and it is quietly absent from most clinic explainers. It matters practically to patients who avoid porcine-derived material for religious or dietary reasons — including many of the Gulf and Muslim-world patients who travel for refractive surgery — and it also matters to anyone who simply wants an honest inventory of what is going into their eye permanently. Rulings on medical implants containing trace porcine material vary between religious authorities and are not ours to give; if it matters to you, ask your own authority, and ask your surgeon to confirm the current material specification with the manufacturer before you commit. The collagen content is understood to be why the material is described as biocompatible and passively tolerated inside the eye, rather than being an incidental ingredient.
What is the hole in the middle of the EVO ICL for?
The central port — STAAR calls it the KS-AquaPORT — is a 0.36 mm opening through the middle of the optic, and it is the single change that defines the EVO generation. Older ICL models blocked the natural forward flow of aqueous fluid from behind the iris toward the front of the eye, so surgeons had to create a drainage route themselves: a peripheral iridotomy, usually a YAG laser procedure performed days or weeks before implantation, sometimes a surgical iridectomy during it. The port makes that unnecessary by letting fluid pass through the lens itself. For a patient this removes a separate appointment, a separate procedure and its own small risk set from the front of the pathway — which is why an ICL trip to a foreign country is a shorter itinerary now than the same trip would have been fifteen years ago. The port sits within the optical zone and is not something patients report seeing. It is also the reason vault tolerances on modern lenses are read differently from those on pre-EVO models.
What is the difference between EVO and EVO+?
The difference is the size of the optical zone, not the material, the port, or the surgery. The peer-reviewed comparison literature refers to the two designs as V4c and V5; commercially they are sold as EVO and EVO+, with the EVO+ carrying an enlarged optic of up to about 6.10 mm. A prospective randomised multicentre contralateral-eye comparison — the strong study design, where each patient receives one model in each eye and therefore acts as their own control — found no significant difference between the two in postoperative uncorrected or corrected distance visual acuity. What it did report was a night-vision difference: patients described seeing better at night through the V5 eye, and the larger optic showed a possible advantage in reducing night-vision disturbance. That maps onto the mechanism you would expect, since a wider optical zone leaves less room for a dilated pupil to reach past the edge of the lens. It follows that the EVO+ is of most interest to patients with large scotopic pupils, high corrections, or night-driving demands — and of least consequence to someone with small pupils and a modest prescription. Which model suits your eye is a decision for the operating surgeon working from your pupillometry and anterior-segment imaging, not a specification to request off a web page.
Is the EVO ICL available in China, and is it the same lens sold in the United States?
It is the same product line from the same manufacturer, and on the newer model China is ahead of some Western markets rather than behind them. STAAR received approval to market the Visian ICL in China in 2006, and China has since become the company's largest single market — a fact STAAR restated in its March 2026 shareholder letter, where it also noted that refractive-surgery penetration in China remains well below many developed markets despite one of the highest myopia rates in the world. For the EVO+ specifically, STAAR reported receiving Chinese regulatory approval in mid-2025 with initial shipments arriving in November 2025 and early demand exceeding its expectations. So a patient asking whether a Chinese hospital can implant the current-generation larger-optic lens is asking about something that has been in the country since late 2025 — a shorter history than the base EVO, and worth confirming stock of with your specific hospital rather than assuming.
Where are the ICLs implanted in China actually manufactured?
In Switzerland. This is the detail almost no clinic page carries, and it is stated plainly by the manufacturer: STAAR's facility in Nidau, Switzerland began commercial production in 2025 and, per the company's March 2026 shareholder letter, is now focused exclusively on building EVO and EVO+ lenses for China. The company describes the move as insulating Chinese supply from US–China tariff volatility and strengthening long-term supply-chain resilience. The consequence for a medical traveller is worth stating carefully, because it inverts the usual anxiety: the implant going into your eye in Guangzhou or Chengdu was not manufactured in China, and it is not a regional variant. It came off a Swiss line that currently builds for that market alone. What China supplies is the surgeon, the operating theatre, the diagnostic imaging and the follow-up — which is exactly the part where its highest-volume refractive centres have their advantage.
Why is the ICL ordered to a size, and what does that mean for my trip dates?
Because an ICL has to fit a space as well as correct a prescription. Every lens carries two independent specifications: the dioptric power, which corrects your refraction, and the overall physical length, which determines how the lens sits in the ciliary sulcus behind your iris. The toric range is built in overall lengths of 12.1, 12.6, 13.2 and 13.7 mm, and the choice between them is made from anterior-segment measurements — white-to-white or, better, a direct sulcus-to-sulcus reading from ultrasound biomicroscopy — run through one of the published sizing formulas. Too short and the lens sits low against your natural lens; too long and it arches too far forward. This is why the ICL pathway is not a same-week procedure the way a laser treatment can be: the measurements have to be taken, the lens has to be specified, and if the required combination of power and size is not already on the hospital's shelf it is ordered. In practice that is what turns an ICL trip into a 6–7 day itinerary rather than a three-day one, and it is the main reason to send your prescription and any anterior-chamber measurements ahead of arrival rather than on the day. Sizing, and the choice of any particular lens, is determined by the operating surgeon.
Does choosing the EVO ICL brand tell me anything about how good my result will be?
Less than most marketing implies, and it is worth being blunt about that on a page otherwise devoted to the product. Because there is one manufacturer and one material, the implant is the constant across every ICL patient in the world — so it cannot be the variable that explains why outcomes differ. What differs is everything around it: whether the anterior-segment measurements were taken well, whether the size was chosen correctly from them, whether your candidacy was assessed honestly rather than accommodated, the surgeon's volume and technique, and whether anyone follows your vault, your eye pressure and your endothelial cell count afterwards. A patient comparing destinations is comparing those things. The brand name on the lens is the one item on the list that is already identical everywhere, and no page, including this one, can promise you an outcome — that assessment belongs to the operating surgeon who examines you.