Cheaters: Their Name and Their Nature

It’s difficult to wander down the aisles of almost any store without encountering racks of “high-fashion” frames bearing the answer to your presbyopic woes. Those drug-store readers beckon to many an unwary baby-boomer with promises of visual youth regained behind suave, yet sprightly, frames bejeweled with little glittery things all over. They may alleviate the [...]

Word of the Day

I had a friend tell me once that she found eyeglasses egodystonic .  “That’s unfortunate,” I thought, “because, you’re getting old and we all know that like hairy ears and sagging buttocks,   presbyopia is but one harbinger of our gradual physical decline.”  I didn’t say it out loud because a tendency for over-emotionalism also often [...]

The Perfect Pair-Part 2

I believe you should really consider the addition of an anti-reflective [AR] coating when filling your child’s lens prescription. A lot of people may cringe at this suggestion because we all know the little buggers can be hard on their lenses. Anyone who’s purchased a pair of glasses with an AR coating knows that they [...]

The Perfect Pair for Kids-Part 1

This is not a treatise on the benefits of the natural feeding of human infants, but rather the first installment of a two-part post containing my ideas of what constitutes optical nirvana when filling your child’s ophthalmic lens prescription. Well, maybe only fools like me achieve anything close to nirvana when considering the composition of the [...]

Electric Lenses?

Conventional ophthalmic lenses might be described in many ways, depending on a person’s point of reference.  Many years ago, while working as a sales representative for a progressive lens company, it was not uncommon to hear people refer to my wares in terms suggesting they were not of the “conventional” variety.  Progressive lens designs, after [...]

Polarizing Priority

Real sunglasses are more than just darkly tinted lenses in a cool frame. Although these types of glasses may serve a function in terms of fashion and diminished light transmission, they are not sufficient, in my opinion, to act as genuine protective sunwear.

Truly protective sunwear should, at a minimum, include a tint with ultra-violet [UV] protection. Many materials, (e.g., polycarbonate), naturally absorb harmful UV rays and don’t require an additional coating. Tinted lenses, however, don’t reduce the disturbing affects of glare—they just reduce light transmission.

Glancing Backward Through the Light

Perhaps the only things we really see instantaneously are the little blobs and flakes of loose matter that float in the chambers in our eyes. Unless something is right on top of your eyes, you are gazing into the past every time you peer out at your world and beyond. The images you see are [...]

Suitable for Framing

It wasn’t too long ago that our choices in lenses were as narrow as “plastic or glass.” This was the predominant question posed to patients in the 1980s and even into the 90s, (even though relatively modern technological options were available at that time). During most of the 20th century, glass was the only material [...]

Fire the Optician, My Glasses are Late

The advent of the one-hour optical shops announced to the spectacle-buying world that a complete pair of eyeglasses can be churned out in an hour. Anyone visiting a mall or with access to advertising media will be able to attest to the fact that these purveyors exist and do make good on their promise most [...]