Archive for September, 2010

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Did you Know?………Varifocals …

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

The spec wearing public are pretty well informed nowadays, about glasses, contact lenses, and eye problems. But a few little queries do crop up with surprising regularity, so here are our top eye queries that you should all know the truth about by now;-

1.       Varifocals have to go into deep frames – we still hear this all the time, but it’s not 1975 anymore! Varifocal designs have moved with the times and the fashions, so now they fit into all but the tiniest frames. Not even Deirdre Barlow wears Deirdre Barlow specs any more, and you don’t need to either!

2.       Children need to be able to read to have an eye exam – this is a dangerous myth that puts sight at risk. We can check eyes from few months of age, with or without the baby’s cooperation! We don’t have to use the letter charts we make you adults read. Some eye conditions can threaten sight if not detected, so book a test as soon as possible and don’t worry about teaching your six month their alphabet before they come!

3.       I can’t wear contact lenses – well what makes you so special?! People think this due to their astigmatism, their age, their need for reading glasses, the list goes on….in truth, thanks to new materials, lens designs and wear regimes, nearly all of us can wear contacts, even if only for specific circumstances or activities. So talk to your optician and let them allay your fears. You’ve got nothing to lose except your specs!

4.       Wearing glasses makes your eyes weaker – now if this were true, couldn’t we also do something to make them stronger? Nothing can alter your prescription permanently, except some highly specialised therapeutic contact lenses. Wearing your specs makes your vision clearer, and you get used to this, so when you take them off things can seem very fuzzy. Not wearing them will give you a headache, so put them on and get on with your life!

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Here Comes the Night- Prescription Glasses coatings?

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

Light evenings are coming to an end now, as the sunset gets earlier and we think about hibernating! A big worry for many patients is driving in the dark, and we get many enquires as the nights draw in. So don’t give up on driving, just take a moment to think about your specs and soon you’ll be back behind the wheel with full confidence restored.

The first thing is to make sure your spectacle prescription is fully up to date. A change in lens power that your optician said was borderline may make a difference when light levels are low. Scratched or damaged lenses or coatings may all interfere with your vision. A new, sharp and clear lens may make a radical difference to your comfort and confidence at night. So if you didn’t change your glasses last time, or didn’t think you needed to, check with your optician as to any improvements that could be made. Make sure your prescription is up to date – was your test within the last two years, or whatever time scale your optician recommended.

Secondly, don’t wear any kind of tinted lens for night driving, for some people even the very lightest tint can impair their vision. Photocromic lenses which change in the sun always have some residual tint, and this gets darker over the life span of the lenses. You may need to invest in a clear pair specifically for night driving.

Thirdly, an anti-reflection layer will help. Light is reflected by the front and back surface of your windscreen, your lenses, and mirrors. Every reflection cuts down on clarity and dazzle from oncoming vehicles is at best uncomfortable, at worst dangerous as you are momentarily blinded. The coating makes sight sharper, cuts out interference, and damps down dazzle – it’s useful to know there’s’ one car coming towards you, not two!

So stay and comfortable on the roads this Winter, with a little thought and care and possibly the investment of some new specs.

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Good Looking Glasses online

Friday, September 10th, 2010

If you need strong spectacle lenses to correct your sight, you probably know that you have to take a little more time before you make a decision on your glasses. A dispensing optician can guide you through the choices, but if you want to buy online the options can be daunting. Here are a few pointers to give you some ideas, and remember we’re always happy to help via e-mail or on the phone.

If you are short sighted, your lens power will have a minus sign in front of it. Your lenses will be thicker at the edges than in the middle, and may have unsightly white reflecting rings around them. From about power -4.00, a thinner lens material will help to reduce thickness and weight. Adding an anti-reflection layer will cut down those dreaded bottle-bottom reflections and improve appearance.

If you are long sighted, your lens power will have a plus sign. Your lenses are thicker in the centre, and thin at the edge. Your lenses will magnify your eyes, and from about +2.00 a flatter lens design will help to minimise thickness, weight, and the magnification of your eyes.  Again an anti-reflection layer will help to make the lenses appear thinner when people look at you.

Whatever your prescription, flatter lenses will help, so look for aspheric lenses, where we change the optics of the lenses to reduce the curve while still giving you the strength you need. Choosing a small frame will also help, reducing lens thickness and weight. For long sighted patients we can also make the lenses to fit the frame, rather than cutting them out of a large lens to start with. Making the lens with your frame in mind reduces the centre thickness and makes it flatter.

If you’re short sighted, a plastic frame will disguise edge thickness and look trendy! A rimless or thin metal will leave all your edge thickness on full display. If you’re long sighted, your lens edges will be thin, so you can choose a metal, but rimless or semi-rimless will make the edges of your lenses vulnerable to chipping or breaking. So think about the practicalities before you fall in love with a frame – you might not love it after the lenses are fitted if they look thick or are heavy.

So, a little time spent before you press that enter key and make your purchase will ensure that you love your new look. If you want our opinion on your choice, don’t hesitate to ask. We’re here to help you look good as well as see perfectly!

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Previews of Paris for Glasses online

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

As we pack away our beachwear and bring out the woolly scarves and hats, our thoughts this autumn are already focussed on the new season and new fashions for next year. It’s show time for the optical trade, as we head to Paris – strictly business of course! – To exhaust ourselves on your behalf at our trade exhibition, Silmo.

It’s important to look at the bigger picture for our customers, seeing what’s new and what we’ll be able to offer you. It gives us to chance to mingle with other opticians, to see entire collections, and get that all important general overview of the new look for the New Year. So other than aching feet, what are we expecting from the Paris show?

All the preview shots of new styles heavily feature the geek look. Solid, unisex plastics in neutral shades, with the emphasis on subtle layered colour, and tactile finishes that will make your frames a joy to wear and handle. Sizes are still getting bigger, as we predicted right at the beginning of the year. The ever popular Ray Ban Wayfarer inspires the on trend shape, with a flat top rim and deep lenses. Everyone from models in the Boden catalogue to groovy rock stars love this look. It’s cool, eternally stylish, and easy to coordinate with your clothes and accessories.

Technical innovations such as new lens types and frame materials will also be there for us check out. A new frame material called Mylon is on our list of must sees – it’s claimed to be light, tough and durable, all we could want from a frame! New materials mean new styles, so we’re looking forward to new variations on sporty styles.

Next year’s sunglasses will also be launched, and again the geek shape will be heavily featured. Our austere times are encouraging us away from bling and towards cool, sleek detail. Graduated tints and mirrored lenses will also be creeping back into the forefront of fashion.

Lots on our must-see list then, we’re excited about a busy four days working hard on your behalf. Paris here we come – the things we do for our clients!!

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General Health Precautions Benefit Eye Health

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Age Related Macular Degeneration is the leading cause of sight loss in the Western world, and research is increasingly discovering that we can all reduce our risk factors with a few precautions that make sense to help general health too. As our population ages diseases due to us ‘wearing out’ are increasing, and ARMD is an example of this. A lifetime of exposure to pollutants, UV light, and a diet lacking in essential nutrients can lead to retinal damage and loss of sight.

Protecting the retina is vital, so we should all wear UV filtering specs, on clear or tinted lenses when we’re outdoors. Interestingly, less people seem to wear specs on the beach than in parks, but note that more light is reflected back from sand and water than any other surface. This is important for children, who are likely to spend more time outdoors, and have less natural protection in the inner structures of the eye. This allows more UV inside the eye, reaching the vulnerable retina. Sunglasses are cool, so persuading kids to wear them should be easy! Make sure they fit comfortably and conform to EU safety standards for full UV protection. Wide brimmed hats will also help to screen the eyes.

The five a day we’re all meant to eat protect your retina along with all the other health benefits it brings in terms of reducing the likelihood of Colon and other cancers. Aim for a range of coloured vegetables, with the emphasis on the green and leafy! Carrots, tomatoes, parsley and blueberries are all excellent too, and supplements containing Lutein and Zeathanthin will help you to maintain high levels of pigment in your retina. Macular pigment filters out the harmful blue light which causes the damage.

Moderate exercise, taken daily, will benefit general health and your sight. Oxygen circulating in the blood stream benefits the eyes too, and arthosclerosis has been cited as a risk factor in ARMD. Give up smoking now! It’s a pollutant that affects the retina as well as every other organ in the body! Keep an eye on your blood pressure, and take your GPs advice if you’re told you need to lower it. Systematic hypertension has been proven as another risk factor to ARMD.

So without sounding like the nanny state, it makes sense that if we can help our eye health along with our general health, that’s more benefits for the same amount of effort – win win!

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Stunning Stripes – Glasses Online

Monday, September 6th, 2010

Frame manufacturers constantly astound us with their inventiveness and originality. We often wonder just how much you do with two rims and a pair of sides! Every new season they come up with subtle variations on size, shape, proportion and of course decoration, and we’re smitten again by new specs!

In the past four or five years we’ve gone from outrageous bling, with frames practically flashing with diamantes, jewels and enamel detail, to more austere frames that fit our belt-tightening times. For the new season, colour and detail are creeping back in, and stripes are an excellent way to bring some interest to your specs without going overboard on the flash factor!

You can use stripes in masses of different ways – layers of laminates, colours, inlaid details, cut out segments, running through the whole frame or in touches of detail. Stripes are a useful way of adding colour without mad pattern, such as a pinstripe in a black frame or red frame to reduce the drama and make the frame more wearable.

Laminated layers within the frame always look good, cut horizontally through the frame front. You can take a really plain shape, a palette of dull colours, and transform them with stripes of colour that make the light play in different ways across the frame. This is good if you want colour but want the frame to go with lots of outfits. Take a raspberry frame with pink stripes – it will look more pink against clothes of the same colour, warm in tone with a smart black suit, and vibrant with matching raspberry red. You can play the colour up or down by enhancing it or calming it down with alternative outfits. This can give you a different look for work or play, just by playing with the attention your frame gets!

Stripes are a good way for men to inject some interest and detail into their specs, a touch of pattern without resorting to anything too girly or scary! So if you fancy a change from your butterfly strewn, wild specs of last year, seek out some stripes!

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It’s A Wrap – Prescription Sunglasses

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

For us spec wearers, summer gives us the opportunity to blend in with every other cool dude, disguising our myopia with prescription sunglasses. This can be blessing or a curse, as we try to get the red-carpet film star or beach babe look in our sunnies while making sure we can see and look good! Prescription sunglasses have become an economical option for all in recent years, thanks to special offer prices and more and more styles becoming available. The only thing you need to take care with is frames that are unsuitable for prescription lenses.

The sunglass trend is always slightly funkier than for clear ophthalmic lenses, going bigger, bolder, and sometimes, more curved. This wrap around style is excellent for sunglasses, as it stops light getting in, and if you’re a keen cyclist then it stops the wind whistling around your eyes too. For non-prescription lenses a large wrap around shield type sunnie can therefore be ideal.

When it comes to adding lens power to a wrap frame however, you can run into problems. Prescription lenses have a curve which is governed by your lens strength. The wonderful laws of Physics do allow us to play around with this to some extent, so you can have curved lenses made to your prescription if the strength is low and the curve can coincide with that of your super cool sunnies. The key here is to talk to the optician before raising your expectations and falling in love with a curvaceous but unobtainable ideal – story of my life!! Make sure the frame you choose has traditional mounts, not some kind of fancy rimless which cannot be glazed with new lenses. Keep the size down as much as possible, and post to us or take into your optician to be assessed. We can get specially made wrap lenses if necessary but these are more expensive, full quotes are always given.

When the Postie delivers your new sunnies into your excited hands, note that your vision might feel a little odd to start with. This is due to the wrap altering your peripheral vision slightly. It usually settles down quite quickly and you’ll stop noticing it. Try wandering around the garden in them before diving behind the wheel or handle bars. Then await the sunshine and get posing!

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Faking It- Genuine Designer Glasses

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

Over the last twenty years our desire for Designer goods has led to high quality, luxury products entering the market place in an industry that encompasses clothes, accessories, and of course glasses and sunspecs. We at the InternetGlassesCompany get the occasional enquiry as to the origins of our Designer ranges, with understandably anxious clients checking that our goods are authentic. The World Trade Organisation estimates that 8% of all goods sold worldwide are counterfeit, creating a negative effect for traders and the health of consumers.

With regards to our frames and sunglasses, we only stock products that are totally genuine, direct from the frame manufacturers in Italy. Like the manufacturers themselves we know that it’s in the interests of ourselves, the brand, the Optical industry and the vital clients to only use authentic product. Forgeries will be of inferior quality, using weak materials and possibly endangering the wearer. With specs this may mean skin allergies, lost lenses and uncomfortable frames.

In practice, we never accept frames which are not genuine. They are destroyed by manufacturers if they reach them to have new lenses or parts fitted, so be warned if you take a fake Oakley or RayBan to an Optician to have a screw or side arm replaced! They always spot them even if we don’t, and there are some very convincing reproductions out there. Always buy from a reputable stockist, check that the cases, cloths and logos are correct – a Ray ban spelled Ray Burn is a bit of a give away!  Note that if you wear dark sunglasses lenses which are not authentic, they’ll probably have no UV protection. The dark lens will allow light to flood into your unprotected eye and over time will cause damage to the retina and crystalline lens within the eye.

This year the Italian Association of Optical goods manufacturers are cracking down on counterfeits. They have strong interest in this problem as the vast proportion of Designer frames sold in Europe are from Italian design houses and factories. July 7th was the first national Anti-Counterfeiting day, and 5000 forged frames were crushed by a road roller as a symbol of their work. We welcome any move to stop the trade in counterfeit goods which will safeguard our business and the health of our patients.

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On Your Bike with Varifocals and UV Protection

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

With Boris furnishing the capital with bikes and all of us striving to be greener, cycling is on the upsurge as a serious means of transport and an ever growing hobby. The lanes around our office are frequently enlivened by Lycra clad chaps pedalling furiously, apparently for fun!

The National Cyclists Association, the CTC, recently did some survey work amongst their members to look at safety on the roads, and discovered that one in four questioned had never had an eye exam or hadn’t had one in the last two years. Our governing optical body recommends that everyone has an eye test at least every two years, with some people being recalled sooner if eye health issues are a problem. Clearly, it’s as vital for Cyclists to make sure their vision is up to the driving standard as it is for motorists, so this is a worrying statistic.

As well of standards of vision, the survey looked at eye protection. 42% surveyed did not wear any sun protection, another worry as Cyclists are fully exposed to UV light when out and about, and this can affect the eyes on cloudy and sunny days. Specs of any description, tinted or clear protect the eye against UV, which can damage the retina and increases your risk of Cataracts. Specs also shield they eye from flying debris.

For the occasional Cyclist, large specs with plastic lenses will be protection enough, and photochromic lenses that go light and dark with the conditions will be a good general purpose option. You can wear them in bright sunlight or after dark, knowing they are safe in all light levels, and they give UV protection. The more serious Cyclist may wish to invest in a wrap around frame for full physical protection against the elements. You can also get them with specialist lenses that improve contrast and show up uneven road surfaces. Sides are usually contoured to fit the face under helmets, and the streamlined shape may even make you go faster! Brands such as Oakley have dedicated models for different sports, cycling included.

The bike may be the transport of the future, so if you’re taking to two wheels instead of four, invest that saved petrol money in an eye exam and some glasses that will make you safer.

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It Shouldn’t Happen to an Optician!- Glasses online

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Our opticians work in practice as well as spending time at the InternetGlassesCompany – a valuable reality check to stay in touch with real patients, not just those of you in Cyber Space! Opticians are all different of course – although they usually share a love of very weird glasses and geeky eye test gadgetry! But all of ours love the diversity of who they meet in the consulting room. This can range from newborns to very elderly people, all needing a different variety of TLC, technical expertise and optical and medical know how. With regards to the latter, you’d be surprised at what our opticians sometimes have to deal with from their swivel chairs…..

“Over my years in practice I’ve had some very odd encounters that you wouldn’t expect an optician to deal with. I once had to cut the very long nails of a young lady who wanted contact lenses but couldn’t bear to get rid of her nails herself. As she was in danger of damaging her corneas with her talons, I had to get a receptionist to witness me giving her an impromptu manicure while she looked the other way! I’ve had to drop everything and drive a chap up to A&E when he had a very severe nosebleed all over the reception area, and also transport an elderly lady who fell off her high heels and twisted her ankle. I’ve diagnosed high blood pressure, a couple of Pituitary tumours, and Diabetes. Skin cancer is another common one that we can spot, I’ve seen Melanomas in the eye itself, but also spotted them on the skin around the eye. Rodent ulcers, also called Basal Cell Carcinomas, are another common one. I’ve also had the pleasure of being shown various scars, re-built joints and even some reconstructive surgery that were all nothing to do with eyes! Then there’s the nappy changes, doing tests with the patients toddler sibling on my knee, and warming milk for hungry babies – never a dull moment! I love my time in practice, however bizarre it sometimes gets, but I like the InternetGlassesCompany offices and Lab too. Working for the InternetGlassesCompany means I can give my technical knowledge and clinical expertise to an internet specs provider, making sure that this new way of dispensing glasses is as ethical, technically correct and professional as any other optical outlet.”

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