Mine are around 800 GBP just to keep them a bit thinner towards the middle with some special cut. Including frames, that's just the total price I remember spending the last couple of times.
Haven't changed them for 8 years now and they're 100% scratches, they lost some protective layer a long time ago from going into the sea with them. One half is glued together. I'm just too lazy to replace them.
Yes, absolutely. All depends on your prescription and sizes though.
Most decent optical labs operate on a sliding scale, going thinner and thinner, but costing more and more. Can get quite expensive (relatively), but if you're going to absolutely baby your glasses, and use something like Zeiss single-use lens wipes, yes I think it's absolutely justifiable for something you're going to use all day, every day for several years.
About 12 years ago, I switched to rimless with carbon fibre arms to try and get the weight down as the option to go as thin as I'd like just wasn't there yet, and I was still stuck with traditional glass, so the weight was a concern for me, and my glasses were forever slipping down my nose (ugh).
Maybe 4 years ago I switched over to hingeless titanium frames (almost wire-thin) with rimless lenses that are incredibly thin and light, and made out of polycarb. Not got my prescription info to hand, but it's a world of difference what's available now versus a decade ago.
They're so thin and light now that I frequently forget that I'm wearing them, and can even fall asleep in them! Oops! They stay stuck on my nose too, I never need to push my glasses up my nose.
I thought pursuing thinner and lighter would be an exercise in vanity, but I can honestly say it's significantly improved my quality of life.
Mine vary from "too thick for almost any frames" to "looks like a normal pair of glasses until you look through them" depending on cost. Mine are somewhere around 1/3rd as thick on the edge as cheaper glass.
Look for "high (refractive) index" lenses. It bends light further, so you need less material / less angular difference to get the same effect.
Interesting, thanks! I figured the thickness was just a function of physics and couldn't be changed, but I wasn't aware of the difference in refractive index.
It generally comes with more chromatic aberrations (rainbow splitting of high contrast edges / light sources), but the tech keeps improving and my current pair is only barely noticeable in my normal vision window. At the edge it basically makes text unreadable though, just because the aberrations overlap enough.
Which is much much better than like 15+ years ago, when I had a pair that had enough aberration that I was happy to get the thicker ones the next time. It was kinda fun being a walking spectroscope, but definitely uncomfortable in quite a few cases.
There is high index polycarbonate and high index trivex. But polycarbonate has a side effect of the optics getting blurry the closer to the edge of the lens you get.
I have a Zenni pair, I think they are 1.74 and around -6 correction in each eye. They are really cheap compared to other places, but they have very high chromatic aberration on the sides and I don't thing they are perfectly centered.
I think it's something that's more noticeable when you need relatively high power lenses.
It's good to have a high quality pair from a local shop so you have something to compare Zenni or other online shops to. YMMV of course, but I've had good experiences with Zenni, and only had one pair out of dozens for my family that had issues (seemed to be uncentered or had the PD incorrect), and that was over 5 years ago.
It's nice being able to grab a cheap pair of glasses for activities where there is a high probability of them getting damaged or lost, and having a backup pair handy. The reduced mental load of not having to worry is worth it!
>so you have something to compare Zenni or other online shops to
That's for sure. I bought a pair from 38dollarglasses.com and skipped the antireflective coating option. As it turns out, if you've worn glasses with AR coatings all your life, plain lenses are really, really surprisingly annoying.
Yep. Once your lenses get above -6 diopter or so it starts to become a serious concern. By -10 diopter it's the driving choice in lens material and design.
At -10.5, -11 I always get relatively low refractive index (~1.5) CR-39 based lenses because it's Abbe number is 60. This means I can still read, say, street signs or flanking computer monitors out of the corner of my eye despite the light going through literally >1 cm of material.
This is what I suspected would be the case. You absolutely do get what you pay for when it comes to optics, but equally, you can over-pay for utter rubbish. If you've got the vocabulary (which you do) to describe and understand what to look for, you can't go wrong.
As someone with fairly pronouced Astigmatism in the expensive glasses camp, I'd say:
1) The glasses have to accurately hold my the lens at a specific location and orientation relative to my eyes in order that they actually work.
Off by a little bit and it's world of splitting headaches and crazy distortion
Achieving that positioning, while dealing with my wonky ears, size of head, eye locations etc - requires knowledge beyond current web systems before ordering and - unless completely bespoke fabrication of frames as well - some form of final fitting post delivery.
- The prescription is sufficiently rare that the lens are not mass produced and instead have to be custom ground and cut to fit the frames before the glasses can be assembled.
Even with Zenni my eyeglasses cost over $100. At Costco they cost $300, and at most other places they cost $600.
I used to always go with Costco, but last year I tried Zenni. The frames are definitely flimsier than any others I've had, which I've heard is generally the case for their wire-frame options—I'm sure their heavy plastic frames are more sturdy, but that's not my style. But the lenses seem as good as usual. Except they polished the edges of the lens instead of leaving them frosted, which creates distracting reflections under certain light (with an Rx of around -9/-10 my lenses are 7-8 mm thick). Despite all that I'll probably stick with Zenni in future.
I wash my glasses with a drop of palmolive dish soap and warm water, then blow any water drops off the lenses. An oelophilic coating (available with Zenni) makes this easy, because the water beads up and almost rolls off.
7-8mm thick?! That's insane. I am pretty sure you can get thinner lenses by using a different index. It will be more expensive but definitely worth it. My Rx is -8.5 and my lenses are reasonably thin.
I can definitely get thinner lenses using a higher-index material, but I selected this lens material specifically because it has a higher Abbe number and thus has less chromatic aberrations. The thickness doesn't bother me, but chromatic aberrations do, a lot. I cannot tolerate the excessive colour fringing high-index lenses have, and while contact lenses don't have this problem I dislike those even more.
I have lenses with an optical index of 1.61, which have an Abbe number of 41. In comparison, basic polycarbonate has Abbe 30 (horrible), high-index 1.67 has Abbe 32, and high-index 1.74 has Abbe 33. The best is CR-39 (index 1.5) with Abbe 59, but that will result in an absurdly thick lens, and I'm not sure it's even available in such a strong prescription.
That's not true. My glasses are super light and the thickness is not a concern whatsoever. I can shake my head back and forth with my head down and they don't move at all. And for the past decade since my Rx got particularly bad I have always found the aberrations annoying, so no, I won't "just get used to them".
I can't stand chromatic aberrations because they make everything outside of the centre of the lens blurry. This worsens my tendency for one eye or the other to wander if I'm trying to focus on something just at the edge of reading distance (road signs or restaurant menus, for example) and makes driving at night in the rain difficult. My current glasses have an acceptable amount of abberations, but my previous set was horrible.
I really should be wearing contacts and I've tried them several times, but I generally find them very uncomfortable and I've always hated how they take away my perfect close-up vision.
Yeah, I've stepped down from the highest index I've used due to the aberrations. Material and grinding techniques have improved since then in general, but it was quite distracting - shift my head a degree or two and bam, rainbow, and further to the edges of the lens it'd be 3+ distinct colored images of every light source.
It was kinda neat to be a walking spectroscope, and see what different light sources produced. But the novelty wears off fast when it starts blurring and coloring text on the outer edges of computer monitors. I'm plenty happy paying another $100-200 every few years for lenses that don't do that.
It's worse with stronger prescriptions, if that explains anything. And it has in general gotten a lot better in the past 10-20 years or so, so if you're looking through a current pair it may be quite different.
Currently, if I look at any sharp contrast edge in daylight and turn my head a few degrees, it'll be lightly fringed by either blue or orange. In the dark with a three-color RGB LED projecting "white" (rather than a broad-spectrum white source) I can get fairly clearly separated dots of different colors closer to the edges of my lens.
They consistently glue themselves to my eye if I don't use eye drops literally every single hour. Miss it once and it might take a half hour to loosen and peel them off.
Not really an option unfortunately, my eyes are apparently too dry.
Smaller is better, although I've found a medium sized Ray-Ban carbon frame that looks modern and is also extremely light. Higher index making the lens thinner also reduces displacement. Most people don't notice I have a strong prescription.
Lenses are much cheaper to manufacture than most people realize. Most of the coatings and upgrades are 95%+ profit with very little cost.
An interesting thing I learned in that industry, the uncut "puck" of plastic/material is usually cut to your prescription via an CNC style machine. The cut instructions are essentially a pre-built CAD file based on your prescription/measurements. A significant cost of the process is paying "click fees" which are essentially IP to use that CAD file or a usages based tier on the CNC machine (however you want to look at it). I think, for the company I was working with at least, it was tied to the CAD file though. I recall some discussion of us changing vendors as current vendor's CAD files were failing QC checks at an unacceptable level. If I remember correctly, it was about $5 of a $20 finished good (averages for a pair of lenses). Every coating imaginable would only add $3 at most to cost of goods.
Memories from ~3 years ago.
IP/Brands drives a lot in this industry and is how Zenni is able to cut costs. A company like Rayban will partner with a lense manufacturer to put a logo on the lense and then charge $300 for the lenses. It's the exact lense the manufacturer would normally sell for $25 but now it has a Rayban logo on it. (I actually had these and ended up scratching off the Rayban logo because it was constantly visible in my periphery).
That sounds about right. I remember having gone to an optometrists office some time back and they were able to cut lenses right there and have glasses ready in an hour. I was amazed and couldn't understand why everyone couldn't do this.
Sunglasses are the worst. They cost basically nothing to make but the profit margin is Inf% b/c of branding. A $20 (at most) pair of non-name sunglasses instantly becomes a $700 pair of glasses once you slap a few PRADA insignias around it.
I used to get my sunglasses from Goodr; they charged $25 for no-slip polarized sunglasses, which were very good. After one of the pairs broke, I decided to get two pairs of Ray-Ban Wayfarers, one for $75, and the other for $200. I knew I was getting fleeced, but I finally wanted a pair of "cool" shades and could finally get them without breaking the bank. :D
The locally made lenses still exists but it's becoming very rare. When I was a kid my parents went to a one-hour place, that made them on the spot. It's still possible but not economical. Not that they passed the savings to the consumer of course. Gotta love economies of scale.
If forgot to mention sales commissions as I was talking about cost of goods. But a variable compensation for the sales person, is a lot of your cost if you are in a retail setting. Believe it or not, your optometrists gets paid commission too (if an employee) as does the person at the desk. It's a sales heavy business. Buy eyedrops, buy lens cleaner, buy here - we really don't want you to walk out the door with your prescription! We have a metric called "capture rate" that our commission is attached to!!
It's not too bad but was a surprise to learn it's much more retail than medical (as a business). I think in most the world it's not even necessary to see a doctor to get glasses, like in the US. I usually leave and buy somewhere else because my doctor just has a crappy selection of frames, every single time, he gives me the prescription when I ask. Then I have to ask for the pupillary distance and he acts like he doesn't know what that is. "Why do you need that?" Because if I buy online they'll ask, "Oh yeah, I can take that measurement".
I'm one of those people but I also keep a similarly crude technique - simple microfiber that I replace regularly
The article mentions washing them, I have never tried this or nothing to back it up, but I suspect that may be where the problem lies. Just replace the cloth. They cost pennies.
They even go as far as to put them back in bags and such. I don't bother and have never noticed an excess of grease, dust, or anything they do. Mine is just replaced every now and then sitting openly on my desk
It's at the point where I wonder if doing less is more. It certainly seems obsessive
People may say microscratches, yada yada. It's so inconsequential that my eyes go bad before the lenses do due to my treatment.
Once you also add amenities like photochromic lenses, it quickly adds up.