High Index Lenses

Look Your Best This Spring With A New Pair of High Index Eyeglasses

Spring is a time of renewal. As the weather begins to warm up and little green leaf. He’s appear on the trees, you know it’s time to take a long look at yourself and your surroundings to see what can be improved this year. Most people start with a thorough bout of spring cleaning, airing out the winter must and clearing out everything that built up inside during the freezing winter months. Now is a good time to sort the garage, wipe everything to the edges and corners, and sweep the spider web out of the ceiling corners but it’s also a good time to consider your own personal situation.

Many people spend some time in spring sorting their closets and personal items for things they don’t wear or use anymore, things that have fallen out of fashion, and things they’d rather replace than repair. This makes spring the perfect time to reconsider your prescription eyeglasses. How long have you had your current pair? If it’s been over a year since your last trip to the optometrist, both your prescription and frames are probably outdated. This year you have every reason to treat yourself not only to a snazzy new pair of glasses, but to a little something special as well like anti-fog coating or even the marvels of high index lenses.

Have You Heard of High Index Lenses?

Even if you’ve been wearing glasses your entire life and though high index lenses have existed for several decades, you may not have heard of them. In fact, most long-term glasses wearers haven’t heard of high index lenses though you can buy them from almost any optician. While the conversation is waiting to happen, the reason most people don’t know is simply that opticians don’t bring it up and people don’t know to ask. Choosing high index lenses would usually occur during the same process of selecting your frames and ordering a new pair of glasses with your prescription and perhaps a few lens coatings. Normally, your optician will give you standard plastic lenses with a mild anti-scratch coating which is what most people have. However, with high index, your latest pair of lenses could be up to 35% thinner, sleeker, and with improved visual clarity.

What Makes Them “High Index”?

High index lenses are designed in a way that enhances a single important feature of eyeglass lenses – the index of refraction. This index represents the speed that light moves through a mostly clear material and therefore the efficiency with which it can be bent with a lens formation. You can see this in action by looking at a drinking straw in a cup of water or your own foot in the pool. That slight bend bend in appearance is because the water has a different index of refraction than the air and the same works for eyeglass lenses which is why they can correct vision.

When light passes through the lens, it changes speed and bends. Normally, a certain amount of material is required to form the lens shape and bend the light exactly the right amount to change the distance your eyes can focus and resolve a clear image. Lenses with a higher index, however, bend light more efficiently and so less material is needed to bend it the right amount. This means that high index lenses can achieve the same prescription with a much thinner lens allowing you to get rid of that unattractive thick lens edge or coke-bottle eye distortion without compromising your visual clarity.

A Much Thinner Lens

Most people who have worn glasses all their lives have lived with the fact that every few years, the prescription seems to get a little worse. This tends to be progressive in childhood, mostly settle in adulthood, and resume deterioration sometime around retirement. Often this means accepting that your lenses will simply continue to get thicker with that terrible flare out at the sides for short-sighted people or the central eye-distorting bulge for the far-sighted. This not only creates a stereotypical ‘nerdy’ appearance, it also effectively keeps you away from the sleek and slender frame designs. However, this dependence on cartoonishly thick glasses has finally come to an end.

High index lenses are thinner and come in varying degrees of index and thinness based on your needs and budget. The standard index is 1.50 and the lowest degree of high index lenses are 1.59 and are already a full 20% thinner. That’s 20% less lens width between you and the rest of the world and 20% less edge to flare out around the sides of your favorite delicate frames. But it gets better. At the next level of 1.60, your lenses are 25% thinner, then at 1.67 they lose another 5% thickness. At the top end of high-index plastic, you’re looking at nearly paper thin, perfectly clear lenses at 1.74 index and 35% thinner than standard lenses even with the most extreme prescriptions.

Looking Your Best This Spring

If you have ever lamented the increasingly thick lenses in your glasses, today is your lucky day. No more pining after those thin gold wire glasses that would look simply ridiculous with your thick lens edges and no more being seen with ridiculously amplified eye size. With high index lenses, you can choose any pair of frames in the store and when they come in, people will finally be able to see the way your eyes really look, not what your glasses used to distort them into. Have you ever wanted half-rim glasses? With high index lenses, you can have any kind of rim design you want as long as you stick with an index that’s thick enough to hold the support wire. Thin fashion frames, elegant metal frames, and even wide plastic frames with thin lenses have all become available, just waiting for you to make a choice.

This spring, you have an opportunity to completely reinvent yourself. While you may not plan on going through the ‘contacts makeover’, you can completely change how your face looks simply by slimming down your lenses and choosing a pair of frames based on your sense of style rather than your need to hide thick lens edges.

Explore Your Options

Spend some time in the frames store this time and don’t be afraid to try on every pair of glasses in the shop if it makes you happy. Take a friend to help you choose and/or ask the optician for their opinion as you decide what your new look will be. Will you be someone who wears little oval glasses or flared catseye frames? Do you want to wear metal frames or plastic this year? Will you be festive or elegant? Having made the choice to get high index lenses, anything is possible.

Spring is a time of renewal and with your new high index eyeglasses, you’ll be able to see those little green leaf buds on the trees with amazing new clarity and the world will be able to see you right back. This year, don’t settle for the same old glasses you get every time your prescription changes. Do something special this spring, treat yourself to something nice and change your whole look with a brand new pair of high index eyeglasses.