- Ready glasses - safety standards
- Ready glasses - why can they hurt your eyes?
- How to safely use ready-made glasses?
Ready reading and corrective glasses can be easily bought at almost every gas station, in most pharmacies, drugstores and supermarkets. They are cheap and convenient. But is it really safe for your eyesight? The expert explains if the shop glasses are harmful to the eyes.
Poready reading glasses and corrective glasseswe reach more and more often. For some people, they are an alternative when everyday glasses ordered from an optometrist are accidentally left at home. But many people use them on a daily basis. Their purchase is prompted by the price (usually we will not pay more than PLN 20 for a pair of ready-made reading glasses), and wide availability.
Ready-made glasses are used not only by adults, but also by adolescents, it also happens that parents buy them on their own and without consulting an ophthalmologist for children who start seeing worse. Since ready-made glasses can be purchased, among others, in pharmacies, they are considered not only comfortable, but also safe. As much as their comfort cannot be questioned, so is their safety. Why?
Ready glasses - safety standards
It is worth knowing that in order to be approved for sale, the glasses must meet certain requirements. They can be sold to a limited extent, and according to the ISO regulation, their power must be the same for the right and left eyes and range from +1.00 to +3.5 diopters. The problem is that hardly anyone who wears glasses has the same defect in both eyes. Therefore, by the nature of things, one of the eyes with such glasses sees worse than the other.
Ready glasses that legally go to stores are also not intended for people with myopia or astigmatism. Such products, however, sometimes find their way to market stalls - in such a case, they have certainly been introduced to the market illegally.
The problem is also the fact that in ready glasses, lenses, according to the ISO standard, must be set symmetrically for the right and left eye.
Meanwhile: - Our face in most cases is not symmetrical. Therefore, such ready-made glasses automatically do not match the shape of our face. Please note that during the examination at the optician's, the eye protection specialistit thoroughly examines not only our eyesight, but also the distance between the pupils and the height of the eyes, all in order to properly mount the lenses according to the user's needs. - explains the optometrist Maciej Ciebiera from the Hoya company.
Ready glasses - why can they hurt your eyes?
Ready glasses, unlike those ordered from an optician, will almost never be perfectly suited to the user's needs. And this has certain consequences. Poorly selected glasses may cause pain and dizziness, pain and watery eyes, negatively affect the perception of the image and the organ of sight itself. The weak or insufficient power of the lenses means that in order to capture the sharpness of the image, you have to strain the eye muscles.
Ready reading or corrective glasses can also simply harm the eyes. The task of the lens in the glasses is to focus the image in a specific place. Focusing it elsewhere means that the organ of sight will try to adapt to new conditions at all costs, which in the long term may lead to unpleasant consequences.
Improper correction of the vision defect may also lead to problems with binocular vision, which - confirmed by prolonged use of the wrong glasses - may lead to vision problems that are difficult to remove, sometimes even requiring the use of specialist vision therapy.
How to safely use ready-made glasses?
Glasses ordered from an optician are a medical product, they must meet specific, very strict requirements and therefore cannot be bought "by eye" - when choosing glasses, the optician will not only match the appropriate eyeglass lenses and mount them in the selected frames, but also will pay attention to maintaining the correct distance between the lens and the eye, and will also check the angle of inclination of the frame.
Ready-made glasses - even those bought in a pharmacy - will never fit so neatly. Therefore, it is not a product that can be used permanently. In order for the ready-made glasses not to harm the eyes, they should be used temporarily - only for short-term reading and near vision. They should not be used for far vision, while driving, and not to protect your eyes.