You may not know this about me, but in addition to being a MOM and a blogger, I also keep hours as an optician. An optician is the person you see at your eye doctor at the end of your eye exam who helps you pick out and order glasses or contact lenses. With all the online eyeglasses ordering that is available these days, you might think - there is an actual job for this? Yes. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about why you need an optician and why ordering eyeglasses is not as simple as plugging in a glasses prescription and pressing add to cart.
I'm going to give you a little eye anatomy lesson: your eye is able to see things by how it perceives light. There are all these little light receptors called rods and cones in there that allow you to perceive color and contrasts. You have a lens at the front of your eye that bends the light entering your eye depending on how it contracts with muscle movements. That allows for focusing the light on the back of your eye - the retina, which is directly connected to your brain and allows you to perceive an image. Now, this is where genetics and other factors come in - some people have "refractive errors/differences" in the way they perceive light. Eyeglasses work by refracting light entering your eye at a certain angle so that your vision is modified to allow for a clear image on the retina. Pretty cool, huh?
When an optometrist writes your eyeglasses prescription, they are writing the "refractive correction" for your eyes. This is the technical order for the manufacturing of an eyeglass lens with specific curvatures that will bend light in just the right way to correct your vision. The higher the number, the bigger the curve your eye needs for refractive correction. Ok. So now you might have a better understanding of how eyeglasses work on a basic level. Some people can't see anything in the morning when they wake up without their eyeglasses, some people have mild prescriptions only discovered necessary when they start getting headaches at work or school. There is a broad range of kinds of prescriptions and what each person's need is for wearing them.
So you have your new prescription in hand after your exam and you are going to order eyeglasses. The first thing you'll need to do is pick a frame to hold the lenses. Frame fitting is very important because the more centered your eye is in the lens, the better results you will get aesthetically with the manufacturing of the lens and the better the lens will fit the user. You don't want the frame to sit too low on the brow, or too high on the nose. You don't want the temples (arms/sides) of the frame to be too tight against the head or too loose, too long or too short. The frame should feel generally comfortable to the wearer - adjustments can be made but you never want to start off with a bad fit.
Next, you are going to talk about lens options with the optician. This is the part of the process where the optician recommends the best lens design, materials and treatments for your needs based on your use goals and your prescription requirements and limitations. Generally speaking, the lens design is usually categorized in a few regular categories of multi-focal (progressive), bi-focal or single vision. The lens design that will be best suited for your needs will be indicated on the prescription written by the doctor; however, sometimes a person will have specific design needs based on the planned usage of the glasses. For example, sometimes a person only wants to use the glasses for one specific task. In this case, the doctor or the optician will modify the prescription to accommodate the specific need.
You might be wondering, what about glass? Glass material is actually still available in some lens designs, however, as you can imagine it is not the safest material to have in front of your eyes. It has excellent light transmission and possibly produces the best refractive results of all materials but its propensity to shatter makes it an unpopular choice.
There are a lot of considerations when it comes to fitting someone with the right frame and lens options - and it all really affects the final product and how useful the glasses are for the wearer. I hope that this "brief" article gives you a little insight into the process of ordering eyeglasses and encourages you to seek out expert advice the next time you are ready to update your glasses. Cheers!
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