As a supplier not only of a range of lenses from budget prices to premium, as well as a similar range of frames, I enjoy advising my clients on their complete eyewear choices,
One question that comes up from time to time is, 'Why would I need more than one pair of glasses?' There are several considerations that you might want to weight, Ask yourslef if your round-the-clock eyeglass experience can be improved - clarity, enhancement, and any specific use are factors to take into account.
Here are a few examples:
Add a dedicated pair of glasses for nighttime driving. Zeiss’s ‘DuraVision Drive Safe’, Essilor’s ‘Crizal Drive’, Hoya’s ‘Enroute and Enroute Pro’, and Nikon’s ‘SeeCoat Drive’, all to different degrees and each with a marginally different emphasis, address the issues of glare and vision focus. First, this type of coating effectively cuts the glare from oncoming headlights, streetlights and illuminated signage. You’ll find differences in emphasis, that is, what portion of the lens amplifies which specific field of view — distance, middle distance and near distance (for dashboard and mirrors). My experience with Zeiss is that DriveSafe helps more with instantly shifting focus from traffic ahead to your mirrors, while Hoya emphasises high contrast in order to more easily pick out details on the road. These lenses are especially effective in the twilight hours, early morning and early evening, but can be used throughout the day, indoors or outdoors.
Apart from a pair of clear glasses, whether untinted or photochromic, a decent pair of sunglasses is essential, even in a relatively low light country like the UK. Protection from ultraviolet rays (which, to varying percentages, many clear lenses routinely provide) is crucial for long term eye health. For driving, the lenses ought to be Polarised in order to shield your eyes from road glare and pings of glare off other cars. For everyday use, the possibilities are endless when it comes to combinations of tints. You can choose different densities and colours, whether to add flash mirror tints, dual- or tri-colours, or gradients, and so on. Of course, I’m happy to advise.
Your sunglass frames should offer broad coverage for your eyes, so they might be wider and deeper than frames you might choose for indoors, casual or formal use. Excellent tints for driving begin with the G-15, a grey-green colour designed originally for aviators, a shade that has very little effect on the surrounding natural colours, and at the other extreme is amber or orange (Zeiss’s 50% ‘Orange Magma’, for instance), which enhances the contrast and, reportedly, sharpens a driver’s reaction time. Avoid blue tints, which distort colour and might make your stop-go at traffic lights a bit dicey.
When you think of your eyewear as an extension of your clothes you begin to find opportunities to refine your style. Just as you’d probably not wear cargo shorts to a wedding, you might choose a more formal pair of frames to accompany a more formal outfit — highly crafted acetate frames in subtle shades, for instance, or finely detailed Japanese acetate-and-titanium frames. (In a future post I’ll go through a list of my favourite brands.) For a more casual or sporty occasion, all titanium, surgical steel, or even aluminium. All of these options are available from a wide variety brands.
For my personal use I enjoy swapping between styles. I wear three different ‘browline’ or ‘half-rim’ frames, two styles of sunglasses, one for driving and one for cycling, and a couple indulgent luxury frames that elevate whatever I’m wearing at whatever occasion just by way of their presence.
There’s no need to create your eyewear wardrobe in one go. Take your time, build them up over a year or two, as your budget allows, and use the internet to find your favourite designers. I’ll give you some leads in my next post!