High Index Lenses

How Not to Extend the Life of Your High Index Eyeglasses

Clear vision is important for most of life’s activities. This is why your eyeglasses get a lot of daily use and why they experience wear and tear. After a while, a time will come when you’ll have to retire them and get a replacement. High index eyeglasses certainly cost more than those with standard lenses, and it’s understandable why you might want to hang on to them for as long as possible. The best way of doing this is by taking good care of them.

Nevertheless, things eventually wear out from years of handling and accidents such as dropping your glasses or sitting on them. Vision changes will also require a new pair of glasses. Sometimes people try to hang on to their eye-wear longer than they should by resorting to a number of ill-advised measures. Here are four of them:

Repairing Scratches by Removing the Anti-Reflective an Anti-Scratch Coatings

Improper care and handling can cause a build up of lens scratches that degrade clear vision and cause glare. Many of these scratches don’t penetrate deeper than the lens coatings. Therefore, removing the scratched coatings gets rid of most if not all of the scratches.

There are etching products on the market that remove the anti-reflective and anti-scratch coatings on plastic lenses. These products leave the plastic lens beneath intact. However, if they are meant for use with standard CR-39 lenses, they may affect the high index lens material of your glasses. If this happens, the lenses won’t properly correct your vision.

Sometimes people use household products such as comet cleanser, which is highly abrasive. Removing the coatings without abrading your high index lenses is very difficult. A similar danger exists when using common household solvents that may chemically react with the lens material.

If you manage to successfully remove the anti-reflective coating, then you reintroduce the very same problem this coating solves: glare. High index lenses reflect a lot of light, and this produces excessive glare. Glare interferes with clear vision and safe night driving. Glare also produces eye fatigue and headache. Reflected light off the outer surface of your lens prevents people from seeing your eyes. An anti-reflective coating effectively eliminates this problem.

Taping a Broken Frame

Sometimes an eye-wear frame breaks at the bridge (which rests on the nose). Wire frame glasses and some plastic frames may do this when poor handling practices or dropping them over-stresses and breaks the bridge. Sometimes, people do a quick repair job by taping the two halves of the glasses together at the bridge. Besides being unsightly, especially if the tape color doesn’t match the frame, the fix allows the frame to bend at the tape join. As a result, the frame doesn’t stay in place very well and is prone to sliding off your face.

Whenever your glasses fall to the ground, you risk scratching your high index lenses. This problem is especially acute when perspiration reduces the friction that holds your glasses in place. This fix isn’t permanent and requires constant re-taping.

Super Gluing a Broken Frame

When the portion of the frame holding the lens in place breaks, super gluing the frame back together can fix the problem. However, this comes at a cost because it may be impossible to remove the lens from the frame should you wish to replace the frame later. This forces you to buy a new high index lens.

Wearing Old Prescription Lenses

Holding on to old high index eyeglasses that no longer do an adequate job of correcting your eyesight means you’re making do with poor vision. The eyes change over time. You need glasses that correct your vision as it is now, not as it was several years ago. Old prescription lenses not only reduce your visual acuity but also cause the discomfort of eyestrain. To maintain perfect vision, see your eye doctor on a regular basis and don’t hesitate to look through our large eye-wear selection.