21 May Understanding and Choosing the Perfect Lens
Choosing the right lens for your lifestyle is often a difficult juggling act of balancing lens benefits versus add on benefits and styles. While vision insurance is great to get you going towards your perfect pair, it often falls short of providing you with all the necessities to get the most out of your Rx. Let us first educate you on the basics of modern lenses.
LENS CATEGORIES
Single Vision: Standard lenses for the correction of myopia, hypermetropia, and presbyopia.
Anti-Fatigue: Single vison lenses with aspheric designs which allow the eyes to relax when doing long periods of near work leading to less eye strain. Many have blue light protection properties included in the design.
Bifocal: Lens designs with two fixed focal lengths, often used for seeing distance and near. This lens does not account for the mid-length viewing such as computers.
Progressive: Lenses which progressively change from distance to near as you look from the top to the bottom of the lens. These allow the greatest in flexibility for crisp clear vision at all focal lengths.
Lens coatings
Anti-Reflective: Multilayer coating protecting against glare, scratches, and smudges. AR makes your eyes more visible to others while stopping unwanted reflections. Most come with 1-2year no questions asked scratch warranties and protect against harmful UV rays.
Polarization: Limits the angle of reflections able to pass through your lenses, reducing glare, and making your eyes more comfortable during activities. Great for fishing, golfing, or any other outdoor activity requiring hyper-vigilent acuity.
Transitions: Darken when exposed to UV light. Great for those who frequently go from indoors to outdoors and do not want to carry a second pair of sunglasses. Increased blue light protection on standard lenses and soon be available as a mirror flash coating.
Now that you’re an expert lets figure out what we recommend based on technology advancements and the positive changes this technology will make to your vision. We use aspheric designs for both single vision and multifocal lenses to make the lenses thinner, lighter, and increase peripheral clarity when looking in different directions. The Essilor Verilux digital progressives all incorporate this technology. Single vision lenses such as the Eyezen also incorporate this same technology but for younger individuals. We are huge fans of the anti-fatigue properties of the Eyezen lens as well as its built in blue light protection.
Essilor Crizalcoatings offer a range of properties which are both protective to your eyes as well as the lenses them selves. All come with at least a 1 year scratch warranty but often times two years from date of purchase. These coatings reduce glare, protect against fingerprints, make lenses easier to clean, protect against UV, and even blue light in some cases.
Transitionlenses are great for those that move from indoors to outdoors frequently and do not want to carry a second pair of glasses. These are especially great for children who spend time outdoors during school but don’t want to bring a second pair of glasses just for recess. Protection from the sun is extremely important, especially in children, as they tend to spend more time outdoors than adults.
When spending large periods of time outdoors you can’t beat ExperioUV polarized lenses. Between UV protection and the clarity of a polarized lens, your vison will have never been crisper. An added benefit of fulltime sunglasses are that they tend to be larger and offer better coverage then a standard optical frame. Some of the highest rates of skin cancer occur around the eyes and are preventable by wearing sunglasses.
As a practice are one of the few practice in Phoenix AZ to be part of the Essilor Experts program, offering you the latest and greatest in lens tech while also providing exceptional value. Feel free to shoot me an email with any further questions!