Choosing Your First Pair Of Glasses – What You Need To Know

If you’ve never worn glasses before, getting your first pair is a new experience – and there’s a lot to learn. Going through a slight loss of vision if you’ve always been 20-20 before can be a little bit daunting – especially if you’re faced with terminology at the optician’s office that you don’t understand. Uncorrected vision may have been causing you a range of problems for some time – headaches, eye strain and other symptoms which you may not initially have connected to needing glasses. So, what do you need to know if it’s become apparent that you will need glasses?

Getting The Right Prescription

There are lots of different types of vision deficiency, so the first step is to identify exactly what correction is needed, with a visit to an optician’s. There you will be taken through a series of standard sight tests to determine exactly the state of your eyes, and given a prescription for lenses to correct the issue. You can either receive a prescription for single-vision lenses, or for varifocals. Single-vision lenses are designed to correct either short-sightedness, where you struggle to see objects which are at a distance, or far-sightedness, where you have trouble seeing objects up close. Varifocals, sometimes called multi-focals, are a prescription for those who have some degree of both problems and need a double correction.

Choosing Your New Glasses

Once you have a prescription, you can choose to get your glasses wherever you like – of course, most opticians will try to steer you to their own offering, but you can also choose to go elsewhere or to buy online if you prefer. There are a wide selection of womens glasses available these days with different frame shapes, styles, top brands and colors, so it’s about finding something which suits your face shape and flatters your coloring. A good sales assistant should be able to help, while many online glasses boutiques allow you to upload a picture and virtually try on different pairs. Shopping online means that you can often access expensive designer frames at a great discount and the variety to choose from is almost limitless. Most retailers online will offer a money-back guarantee should the glasses you choose not suit you when they arrive. 

Think About Functionality

As your glasses are your most visible accessory, style is definitely an important aspect of making your choice. However, you also need to consider the functionality of your choice as well. Think about your lifestyle when making a choice – if you work with a computer all day, you can choose a digital protection coating to the lenses to reduce the strain on your eyes. Similarly, if you spend time outdoors, adding adaptive lenses that offer UV protection in bright light can be a smart idea. And if you’re very sporty, you can get special prescription sports glasses which are more flexible and made to be durable and scratch resistant – or you may want to consider contact lenses for some occasions and glasses for others. Either way, speaking to your optician about what’s available can really help to narrow your choices down and find the pair of glasses which is most useful and functional for you.

Samantha

Samantha hails from Virginia and is a proud wife to a retired Deputy Sheriff and mother to two amazing little boys named Jack & William. A veteran product reviewer; Samantha has been reviewing products for 8 years and offers high quality product reviews with original photography.