Our vision is always, slowly, changing because the physical features of our eyes change as we age. The muscles that change our focus from, say, between the TV across the room and the magazine in our lap lose their elasticity, so the transition is harsher, each focus softer. You may have started wearing corrective lenses when you were a kid, maybe in teenage, and as you’ve aged the time between eye exams has likely got shorter. Once a year instead of once every three or so. Consequently your optician has informed you that your corrective needs have become more complicated.
The single focus lenses that once worked for you, bringing clarity to your sight at every distance, now, you notice, leave areas in your field of view that are less than perfect. After you hit your late thirties or early forties you might notice that the images on a TV or movie screen have become soft around the edges. Or you need more help with near vision, for reading a magazine page or checking an email on your phone. Your first stop in the latter case is likely to be a pair of reading glasses, either off the rack or fine tuned to your prescription. While it’s not big deal to get used to setting aside your distance pair and picking up your reading pair, you may begin to ask yourself whether there’s a one-size-fits-all solution.
Back in olden times, the solution — still available today — might be bifocals, which combine far distance correction with near distance correction. Your line of sight bumps up against the hard division between the two areas of correction. You might even opt for a trifocal, which in narrow bands of correction helps your distance, middle and near fields of view. By most modern aesthetic standards, lenses divided with these sharp lines dividing the different foci, from both sides of the lens, look clunky and unattractive. Unnecessarily so.
It might surprise you to know that progressive lenses have been around since
1959. They offered a seamless transition from distance to near vision with one drawback: significant peripheral distortion. Then in 1972 the Varilux 2 came onstream. The design radically improved visual comfort by reducing peripheral distortions and widening the clear viewing areas. In this century, by way of a technology called digital surfacing, that is, computer controlled, micron by micron carving of each unique lens, the transitions between far distance, middle and near distance became for all intents and purposes, effortless.
I started wearing progressive lenses, Essilor’s version, if memory serves, in the 1990s, when getting adjusted to them (after wearing distance-only lenses for decades) took about a week. Since then the technology has become so refined and advanced that customers new to progressive lenses find that they are able to slip into their new lenses like slipping into a warm bath.
Every manufacturer, of course, offer their own variations and tiers of progressives. Again, for my own needs and history, I’ve settled on Zeiss’s SmartLife Superb for the majority of my pairs. In the upcoming weeks I’ll give their newest example, ClearMind, a go, and will report here on how they compare to SmartLife. In the meantime, if you are still stuck in the single vision or bifocal or trifocal rut, let me plant this seed in your mind: try progressive lenses and be astonished by their power to return you to your youth... at least as far as your vision goes!