Archive for October, 2009

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Body Talk

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Body language is a fascinating subject, and no area is more intriguing than what we say just with our eyes……want to know how to stop a bore in their tracks, be taken seriously in business, or avoid confrontation? Then read on, because the eyes have it…

When we’re making contact with real people, not just dealing with them in cyber space, our focus is on the face. What their eyes are saying is the bulk of the unsaid information that we get from them, and some of it is even involuntary – the pupils send out signals that are a reflex reaction we can’t control. If you make eye contact and hold someone’s gaze you can let them know they’re attractive to you and you find them interesting. Your pupils will dilate and subconsciously the message will get across. If you’re holding the look to intimidate or show hostility the pupils will constrict.

You can hold eye contact to stop the party bore from going on at you, look them right in the eye and don’t move a muscle! That unflinching stare will have them tailing off and beating a very hasty retreat. If however you want to keep someone’s interest, engage them by letting your gaze wander over their face, from eyes to mouth as they’re speaking. This wraps the two of you into a world of your own.

In business situations if you want to control your listeners, direct their gaze, using a pointer during presentations for instance. This will make sure you are in charge of where their attention lies. If talking one to one focus on the space between eyes and the centre of the forehead, which keeps you in control of the situation. For real power and to dominate your audience narrow the eyes a little – think Anne Robinson and every James Bond baddie!

If you shy away from difficult situations and you want to step away from confrontation, you can submit easily by breaking eye contact, and looking away. This gives them power over you, but will diffuse their anger by subtly letting them win.

If you’re not convinced by the power of eyes, think of Princess Diana and her incredibly appealing dipped eyes, giving her the power to elicit sympathy and empathy from the public. So get out there and practice flashing those baby blues!

Princess Diana Dipped Eye Gaze

Princess Diana Dipped Eye Gaze

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Question Time

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Here at the IGC we want to make it clear to all our clients and prospective clients that we are more than just another online glasses seller. All of our team are professional, qualified staff with 75 years optical experience between them! It must come across to people that we know what we’re doing, because we get lots of mail and phone enquiries. Most are not about products bought from us, they are questions about specs they’ve got from elsewhere. We’re always happy to help, and we’ll get in touch as soon as possible if you need us. Here are some of this week’s mails:

I love rimless glasses but I’ve broken two pairs!! I’d like some more – am I unlucky, are they really easy to break?!

Rimless can be a problem, they’re definitely more vulnerable then ordinary glasses with frames. If you look at how they’re made, the sides and bridge have to be attached to the lenses by drilling through them, so you’ve got less structure to the specs, and you’ve created a potential fault by piercing the lens. The IGC don’t stock rimless, as too many people are disappointed by them, but we do have semi-rimless specs, which give you the best of both worlds. They’re still light and unobtrusive, but stronger then rimless. This may be the ideal choice for your next pair.

My lenses power is quite strong, so I can’t wear sunglasses. I don’t like the photochromic lenses my optician sold me, they’ve got dark rings around outside of the glass. Are they all like that?

Photochromic lenses go dark when exposed to UV light, thanks to crystals within the lens material that react to UV. If you’re quite short sighted then the edges of your lenses will be thicker than the centre, and consequently more crystals will be concentrated there, so the edges appear darker. You could pick a standard frame – not too big as you’re short sighted – and then have a lens put into it with a fixed dark tint. The colour will be the same all over, and they’ll look like any other sunspec.

I ordered some reading glasses to give me lots of room to see when I do embroidery. They’re very thick compared to my vari glasses. Is this right?

Varifocal specs have your distance power at the top of the lens, blended into middle distance then close work. The lens is made in such a way that it’s thinned during manufacture, and as it only has distance power at the top, they will always be thinner than standard reading glasses. The extra strength you need for reading, and the bigger frame will increase the thickness. If you can’t cope with the weight of them you could go for thinned down plastic, which will make them lighter and not as bulky.

Don’t be afraid to mail us with your queries if you need help – even if you’re not purchasing yet. We love a challenge and we like to help out!

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Small & Perfectly Formed – Do’s and Don’s for contact lenses

Monday, October 12th, 2009

In the UK there are an estimated 3 millon contact lens wearers, including full and part time wearers. Contact lenses are a cheap and disposible option that you can throw away after a day, wear for a week, a month….the choice is down to you and your optician. If you’re thinking of trying them here are a few dos and donts to consider, or if you already wear them this may jog your memory as to how you should be looking after them!

DO!

  • Keep a spare pair of glasses in case of infection or lost lenses. Check out www.theinternetglassescompany.co.uk for affordable specs you’ll be happy to be seen in!
  • Take special care with hygiene – always wash and dry hands thoroughly before dealing with your lenses. Use a fluff free towel to dry your hands.
  • Use solutions exactly as instructed by your optician. Don’t mix solution types.
  • Remove lenses immediately if they feel uncomfortable or if your vision is blurred.
  • Keep up to date with checks at the opticians, they are concerned with the health of your eyes as well as your sight.
  • Stick to wear regimes as recommended by your optician – if they are daily lenses throw them away after use.
  • Keep your nails smoothly filed and watch out for rough skin that may tear lenses.

DON’T!

  • Use tap water for storage, cleaning or rinsing. It may contain Acanthamoeba, a  bug which can seriously damage your eyes.
  • Keep your lenses in over night unless they are of a specific type suitible for sleeping in.
  • Wear them for swimming, unless they are disposible and you throw them away immediately afterwards. Or use them with water tight goggles.
  • Use eye drops while you have your lenses in, unless your optician has recommended it.
  • Use out of date solutions.
  • Let lenses dry out, keep them stored in the correct solution – and don’t wet them in your mouth!

Nasty complications can occur if you’re not careful with lenses, so take your opticians’ advice seriously. As specs and lenses are so competitively priced you can afford to change your eyewear and therefore your look, so maybe it’s time to take a look at lenses!

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Celeb Watch October 2009

Monday, October 12th, 2009

After the hectic social whirl of London fashion week we’re itching to wriggle our toes out of our Jimmy Choos and relax with some celeb watching – quaffing all those champagne cocktails is simply tooo strenuous. Our fave Celebs were all out and about during fashion week of course, and the delicious Indian summer gave them the opportunity to shine in their sunnies……

Victoria Beckham – the ultimate Celeb and darling of fashion week with her seriously chic collection. Adding a little more edge to her look has worked wonders and she’s now ahead of the fashion pack. To enhance this sharp new image she accessorised with her trademark MASSIVE shades in classic black. Stunning with that gamine crop and her tiny face.

Victoria Beckham massive sunshades

Victoria Beckham massive sunshades

Mary-Kate Olsen – These girls are so cool, and Mary-Kate took her place front row at the runway in very Victoria-esque big square shades, obscuring half her face but nicely balanced by a cloud of golden waves.

Anna Wintour – Crushed under the weight of her enormous Wayfarer shaped sunnies, a little overpowering on her small frame. Still, if it’s one thing Anna does, it’s power…..

Anna Wintour - Wayfarer shaped sunnies

Anna Wintour - Wayfarer shaped sunnies

Kim Catrall – We are loving the sneaky shots of the new Sex in the City film!! Cannot wait – but peeks at the trends are keeping us going! Kim looked fabulous this week in very big plastic sunnies, but with a neat little twaist of some subtle detail – this girl rocks!

So keep an eye on our Celebs and stay ahead of the pack this season, shoulder pads and shoe boots at the ready, and the biggest sunnies you can find. October will be vampire month – New Moon, True Blood – giving us the perfect excuse to go all goth vampire and Celeb trendy in our shades – two looks for the price of one!

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A Look for a Lifestyle

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

It’s all to easy nowadays to get online and order your new glasses, or call in to the high street optician and just order some specs like the ones you’ve had before. The choice may seem bewildering so it’s easy to see why sometimes we want the simple option, and go for what we’re used to. If you’re thinking of new specs, take a few minutes to think about your lifestyle, and your next pair may even make life a little easier for you.

If you spend hours twittering or poking, or playing online is your main occupation, you may need to consider a coating that will make your vision more comfortable. Anti-reflection coatings cut glare, reduce eyestrain and fatigue, and generally make your eyes more comortable. They look good too as they make your lenses look super clear.

UV protection becomes an issue if you spend lots of time outside, or have very pale eyes. UV can damage the retina, and increase your risk of cataracts. If you do have pale eyes and therefore little natural protection from UV, a UV coat will stop the damaging rays from entering the eye. This is especially important if you ski or spend time on the water.

If your outdoor time is spent in sunny climes, you’ll need protection from glare as well as invisible UV. Bright sunshine can be uncomfortable and distracting, especially through the windscreen. You might want to consider photochromic lenses, which darken in the sun, or fixed tint, prescription sunglasses. Fixed tints work better behind the windscreen, but you have to remember to keep clear specs with you for night driving.

If you need reading specs and spend intense periods of time on specific hobbies, you may benefit from prescription lenses that give you the exact magnification for your working distance. This will be different for embroidery, or a work bench, or a VDU screen. Measure your working distance and tell your optician what you want the specs for. They’ll calculate the strength you need for perfect vision.

There’s a solution for every eye wear dilemma nowadys, so don’t be afraid to talk about your needs and see what product will suit you.

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Varifocals – Top Five Tips for Three-In-One Success!

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

For those of you over the age of forty with arms that are a teeny bit too short now, you’ll be making that tricky decision to go for reading glasses, bifocals or varifocal lenses. This is always a difficult age, especially now that we all use computers and have busy, dynamic lifestyles. Unless you do just sit in a chair and read a book varifocals are the only specs that will let you everything without having to take your glasses on and off. So are they for you? Will they work? Here are our top five tips for varifocal success….

Varifocal vision

Varifocal vision

1.Be prepared for the fact that you will have to move your head. The varifocal lens has reading, intermediate, and distance vision all within the lens. This leads to distorted areas at the lens edges, so you have to turn your head to see past these. You have to work with the lens to get the best result.

2.Give yourself time to adjust to the lenses. It is rare for a patient to put varifocals on and immediately feel at home in them. They take a good few days to get used to. Put your old specs away, put the varifocals on, and resign yourself to a day or two of feeling a little odd! Most people settle down with them within a week. A little adjustment or advice may tip the balance and make the lens work for you if problems persist, so contact your optician.

3.Choose a frame which is deep enough for the lenses. Frames don’t have to be huge, but they do need enough depth to give you room for the reading area. If your optician tells you the frame is not suitable, then don’t even attempt it. There is a minimum workable depth for each design of lens, ignore this at your peril! Your optician will notify you if the frame you’ve chosen won’t work.

4. Keep the limitations in mind. Although varifocals allow you to do most things happily without thinking about your glasses, there are a couple of situations where they won’t work. Depending on your stance, they may be difficult for golf. If you like to burrow down and read in bed, this can be the wrong angle to see out of the bottom segment of the lens. Prop yourself up and make sure you’re looking down through the lower area. For any career where you need to see detail above your head – electricians and pilots take note – you’ll have difficulty as fine detail is only accessible through the lower porton of the lens.

5.Only order varifocals if your optician guarantees them. All varifocal manufacturers offer guarantees, so a good optician will pass this on to the consumer. If all else fails and they don’t work for you, make sure they can be returned or replaced with another option.

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Facing the Future

Friday, October 9th, 2009


All eyes were on Paris during September, when the mighty Silmo exhibition showcased all that’s hot and exciting in Optics this Autumn. The statistics are mind – or rather eye boggling! 1000 exhibitors, 45,000 visitors, over 95,000 square metres. That’s an awful lot of eye wear!

The major event, the Silmo D’OR awards, put innovation and design in the spotlight, so we were desperate to see what new goodies we’ll be able to get our hands on for the coming year. Eye wear is as season and style based as any other area of the fashion industry, constantly moving, evolving, giving us new products to enhance our lives.

Silmo D’OR award winner

Silmo D’OR award winner

Seeing all that eyewear laid out under one roof gives you an excellent overview of the coming season. You see it all as a look, rather than focussing on single styles. The big impression that we left with was well, BIG! Frames have been gradually growing over the past couple of years, although the trend has yet to hit the British High Street. For those of you who dispair over tiddly little frames and want something chunky for your money, this is good news. For the very short or long sighted this is not a good thing, as your lenses will be thicker in a large frame. So hopefully there’ll always be a market for small sizes.

Flat, matt colours were popular, a departure from shiny plastics and engraved metals. The upcoming trend from a lot of manufacturers was simple shapes, plain finishes, and bold, uncompromising frames where the shape and colour do all the talking. It’s a very clean and pared down look, and not for the faint hearted. Despite the simplicity this is eye wear that shrieks look at me!! I don’t need to detract from my fabulous good looks with fiddly detail!

Rimless mounts had lots of colour, many were a mixture of plastic inlaid with metal, and the beauty of rimless is creating your own mixture of shape and colour to your individual tastes. There was much here to provide new looks for rimless devotees. Sunspec lenses were solid and dark, and sunglasses were HUGE!! Let’s hope we have some sun to try them out with next summer!

Of course most of our manufacturers are European, but the looks we saw here are bound to filter down to the Great British high street or an online optician near you – watch this space!

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Under the Knife

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

We all know how precious our sight is, and fortunately for most of us a visual defect is easily corrected with prescription glasses or contact lenses. At the drastic end of the scale refractive laser surgery is the other option we might choose, but what else goes on when it comes to placing your vision in the surgeon’s hands?

The most common complaint treated by surgery is cataract. Catarat is simply an opacity in the crystalline lens of the eye, whch means your sight becomes cloudy over a period of time. This may happen due to trauma or just ageing, and can be rectified by an operation when your sight is sufficiently affected. It is simply treated by removing the lens and replacing it with a plastic one.

If your eyes don’t work together, and one or both turn abnormally, you may need an operation on the muscles that control eye movement. This condition is called strabismus. The surgeon may need to loosen or tighten the muscles, or re-position them to ensure the eye moves correctly. They can even use a suture that can be adjusted after the operation, to give perfect alignment of the two eyes.

Glaucoma is usually controlled with eye drops. This eye condition arises because the pressure of the fluid within the eye is too high, and if left untreated it leads to damage of the optic nerve. Surgery may be required if drops don’t control it. There are different types of procedure, but all aim to decrease pressure by allowing the fluid to drain properly or prevent over-production of it.

Refractive surgery is more commonly referred to as laser surgery, although lasers are actually used for procedures other than visual correction. LASIK and LASEK are the most common methods, although there are many ways of achieving the aim of re-shaping the cornea to correct the power of the eye. These are simple surgeries, usually performed under local anaesthetic and with excellent results.

Laser Eye Surgery

Laser Eye Surgery

Whatever the operation required, make sure you get all the advice you need and you’re prepared for what’s ahead before, during, and after the operation. Adhere strictly to advice on aftercare and use prescribed drops exactly as instructed. Some surgeries require general anaesthetics, others local, so be prepared for your recovery period and don’t be afraid to ask questions.

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Baby Blues!

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Of all the eye colours that we humans could have, blue eyes are probably the most mythical and celebrated. Would Paul Newman have got where he did without those piercing blue eyes? We flash our baby blues, suggesting innocence and purity, while for many they are the beauty ideal of a starlet or aspiring model. Princess Diana was famous for hers, Frank Sinatra made a name for himself out of his, so if you’re a blue eyed girl or boy, what does this mean for you?

Paul Newman Peircing blue eyes

Paul Newman Peircing blue eyes

In European children a baby’s eyes will often start off blue and gradually darken to green or brown as pigment develops during the first few months of life. The eye colour change will usually occur around the age of one, although it may still be altering up to the age of three. So we associate big blue eyes with child like vulnerability as they are more commonly seen in the very young. They are a genetically recessive trait, and are most common in people of the British Isles, Scandinavian countries, and areas of northern Europe.

Blue eyes are only blue because they have lower levels of melanin, the pigment that gives us our eye colour. The blue colour is from the underlying layers of pigmentation and the fibrous tissue beneath the outer layer of the iris. This lack of pigment leaves your eyes susceptible to UV damage, and the paler your eyes the more you need to protect them. Wear full protection sunglasses in bright sun, and especially if you’re in high UV situations like the snow or sea

If you fancy a change blue eyes are the most easily enhanced or changed with coloured contact lenses. If your blue veers more towards grey, contact lenses can bring our your true blue potential!

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Another Forty Year Old Virgin!

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Well I finally faced up to my fears last week, and took a brave step into a whole new world……don’t be too impressed…..it may not be that big a deal to you!!  Basically I finally got my eyes tested and started wearing my new glasses!

I’d been in denial for quite a while actually, pretending that I could still see to read, ignoring the crows feet rapidly spreading because I have to squint after dark to see the paper. Guessing at menus in restaurants because they’re all small writing in fancy fonts. Several friends told me that this is what happens when you get to forty.  Not bad going then as I’m now forty-six,  so I went for my first ever test, quite liked all the gadgets and technical stuff, left clutching my glasses lenses prescription and a slight feeling of confusion!

I was too scared to talk to the optician, although she seemed really nice. Perhaps I’ve got some kind of consulting room phobia. I got online when I got home and played around with some internet glasses selling sites. I was quite relieved that I only need specs for reading, and at last they didn’t find any bizarre diseases or give me big chunky bottle bottom lenses. I pressed a few buttons on the keyboard and soon my specs were winging their way towards me.

I like wearing them actually, they’re kind of smart, and I feel they give me an intellectual air! I no longer have to pretend to do the Times crossword! Writing is blacker and sharper, and although I can still manage in daylight, they’re definitely better in the evenings. The optician says my near sight will get slightly worse over time, but I’ll just need stronger lenses. This is called Presbyopia, when you need glasses for reading. Just another part of getting older!

I’m getting a second pair so I can keep them at work, in case I do need them for reading very small print. They’re making life an awful lot easier, so I wish I’d gone a couple of years ago.

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