Glasses direct blog

Orbis is a nonprofit organization fighting blindness in developing countries, where 90 percent of the blind reside and yet 80 percent of those 45 million people suffer needlessly because their blindness is curable – often easily and quickly with the right skills and equipment. Once cured, the patient can often return to work, improving the quality of life not just for them but also for their dependents. Orbis fly a refurbished DC-10 jet aircraft, where local doctors, nurses and technicians work alongside an international medical team to exchange knowledge and improve skills, and carry out operations.

Over the last year or so, you might have noticed that selected frames on our site were earmarked as eligeable for a £1 donation to be made, for each purchase, to the charity Orbis. The funds raised from customers through sales of these glasses amounted to £8,610 which we have passed over to Orbis. On behalf of them and us, many thanks!

In September when the plane is due to be at Stansted, I’ve been invited to tour the plane and meet the medical team who will be able to update us on how your funds have been used to support the trachoma eradication programme in southern Ethiopia, a project that hopes to wipe out this particular cause of unnecessary blindness.

Today, I visited Moorfield’s eye hospital, and looked round their new Children’s Eye Centre which is a remarkable and fun place to be – another organisation doing great things related to our field of work.

If you have already read part one of our guide to understanding your glasses prescription then you’ll love this second installment, helping you to decifer what your glasses prescription really means.

So what else might you find written on your glasses prescription?

When handed your prescription, it will usually be written on a headed piece of paper from the optician or, if you are of a certain maturity, an NHS form (with GOS2 written in the corner). The prescription is obviously the most important part of the form but there are sometimes, if not always, other bits of information scribbled alongside that can get overlooked or confused with the actual prescription itself. So here are our top tips for what to spot.

1. Check it has your correct personal information

A sight test form must have your name and the date on which your sight test was carried out on it. A prescription without a date is not complete. Any ophthalmologist worth his parking space will also put your date of birth on it and the date your next eye test is due. Your age is a good indication to an optician of how susceptible you might be to certain eye conditions such as glaucoma, age related macula degeneration, diabetes and high blood pressure; this is why your date of birth is a very useful thing to have on your prescription.

2. Understand your Vision and Visual Acuity readings

These two, although sounding similar, are kind of like the ‘before and after’ results of the test. When you sit in the ‘mastermind’ chair and desperately start trying to read all the letters on the chart don’t get flash and try to remember them from the last time you were there, the optician will find you out! The point is that the letters on the chart represent how well you can see (or not) without your glasses on. The results of your chart test will give you your uncorrected ‘vision’ reading; it is normally written as a fraction like 6/18. There will be one for each eye (monocular) and one for both together (binocular).

After your eye test, your optician will now get you to put on a trial frame and ask you to repeat the letter reading as far as you can go whilst they drop in lenses to find your best prescription. Much like tuning into a radio station it’s not just a question of ‘cranking up the power’ but more a case of finding the comfortable level of vision for you. Again he or she will test each eye in turn and then both together. This corrected vision is called the Visual Acuity and is important because it lets us know how well you see with your specs on. Sometimes 20/20 vision is not achievable no matter how many lenses are put in front of your eyes. This measurement is written as a fraction and if good visual acuity is achieved may look like 6/4 (i.e. vision better than 6/6).

3. Understand your Reading Addition measurement

The ADD or addition is your requirement for reading and is normally worked out for a distance of around 12-14 inches. If you work at a different distance (like a stamp collector for example) you should let your optician know this. The ADD is closely linked to age and normally manifests itself from the age of 40. As your eyesight will worsen with age, at 40 your reading addition will be approximately +1.00, +2.00 at 50 and +3.00 at 60 and so on. So there’s no way you can lie about your age to us opticians!

We hope you found these tips useful. As always; if you have any questions about your prescription, you can contact our team of dispensing opticians on 08456 88 20 20, Monday-Friday 8am-6pm and Saturday 10am-4pm.

Image courtesy of lanuiop

After a visit to get your eyes tested, you could be forgiven for being a bit baffled by the abbreviations and numbers that appear on your prescription. It’s not just a bit of paper, these are your optical requirements, the particular requirements your eyes need to be able to see as well as possible; it is the ‘menu’ from which a dispensing optician will put together your visual feast in spectacle form.

Your Glasses Prescription: So what do all the numbers mean?

Well, as you look at the prescription, the right eye correction is always on the left of the page (just to confuse you), this is because us opticians always imagine that we’re looking at you, so it’s OUR right as opposed to YOUR right. Confused? Well it should become clearer as I go on. The prescription is broken down into a SPHERICAL power and where applicable a CYLINDER and an AXIS (a cylinder will always have an axis with it).

The spherical component will either be positive (long sighted) or negative (short sighted) and for the lucky few zero (or plano) if the eye has “perfect” vision. As always unfortunately, the higher the number or further away it is from plano, the more long or short sighted you are.

The cylinder value shows us that the eye is not round (football shaped) but oval (rugby ball shaped), both shapes are very common and both can give a great pair of spectacles! The cylinder value can again be writen in positive or negative form but in most eye tests a negative value is most common (purely down to where the ophthalmic optician went to university). The axis that follows shows us quite simply which meridian or axis this cylinder power runs on and could be anything between 1 and 180 degrees.

Now those numbers will represent the distance (driving, tv, walking around) part of your vision. In a lot of cases, the optician will have written underneath (but it could be written anywhere unfortunately) a reading addition. This is the extra help you need to see things close-up and is normally written down as simply ADD. This number is always positive and will sometimes have R+L (right and left obviously) after it. It is very rare to have an ADD for one eye only or to have different ADDs for each eye.

Your Glasses Prescription: Why do prescriptions look different from different opticians?

Although they all give the same information, prescriptions can be written in many different and untidy ways. There is no industry standard prescription and so most opticians use what best suits their systems. If you find that you are unsure about any part of your prescription, the best course of action is to speak to a dispensing optician before ordering. They may be just numbers to you but to us they can reveal all we need to know about your eyesight and help us to create a perfect pair of specs for you.

You can speak to any of our highly trained dispensing opticians on 08456 88 20 20. Monday-Friday 8am-6pm and Saturday 10am-4pm.

…you’ll see these posters on our walls.

The first is a poster showing our ‘Guiding Principles’. These principles have evolved over time. As you might expect, these guidelines are mostly concerned with ensuring our customer is at the forefront of our mind at all times and that the company is a fun, rewarding and inspiring place to work for.

Whilst the first poster illustrates the way we like to go about business with each other, the second poster answers the question ‘What is special about Glasses Direct?’ or simply, ‘What do we do?’

There is always more we can do to learn and improve our proposition, and we are constantly learning and developing based on your feedback, but these posters show what we aspire to be. Let us know what you think in the comments below, especially if you think we have missed anything out.