The art and science of making glasses is an interesting blend of expertise, experience and complex physics. With respect to making your spectacle lenses, we have to take your prescription and accurately make your lenses to the powers stated by your optician. The strength they give us corrects your sight for the required distance; – far, intermediate and near.

Besides the power, we need another piece of information – the measurements that put the lenses in the correct place to make your sight comfortable. For all glasses we would ideally like to know the distance between your pupils, the inter pupillary distance. For very high prescriptions – over plus or minus ten, this could cause problems with eye strain if it’s not right. For lower powers it’s not too much of an issue, although we always make it accurate for any strength.

You can ask your optician to give you your pupil distance after your eye test, or if you haven’t got it, take it yourself – see the IGC website for instructions – could make for a fun evening’s entertainment if you enlist the help of a friend!

If you can’t manage this then don’t despair, we can still make glasses for you. Thanks to our huge amounts of data regarding patient age and gender we can calculate a pupil distance. We also check all of our orders as they come in to make sure that distances our customers give look logical for the data we have. If the pupil distance is ever wrong – and we’re proud to say that we’ve never had any spectacles returned to us so far – you would not suffer any long term ill effect. At worst you’d get a bit of eye strain or a slight headache, which goes when you take the spectacles off. Of course if you do have any problems with your glasses we’ll just change them for you.