MIT Media Lab claim to have found a way to get your eye prescription – through a new app on your mobile phone. It works by clipping a small plastic device onto your mobile phone, looking into the lens and pressing the arrow keys several times. It all takes less than two minutes – less time than making a cup of tea! The company has built this app for use in developing countries which lack these systems, to ensure people are looking after their eyes.

Imagine… testing your eyes and then browsing online to find a pair of glasses you love all in the comfort of your own home – you wouldn’t even have to step out of your front door. Check out a short video here to see exactly how it works. Well we’re certainly going to be watching this space. For those of you reading this, do let us know about any other new and inspiring technology developments in the optical world, we’d love to hear all about it…

Recently featured in Wired magazine, you will need a microscope to see these glasses. This is a 2mm frames sporting a 0.1mm logo, seen here pictured on a house-fly. The logo is the equivalent size of a human hair, and was lazered onto the frames using, from a stationary machine, whilst the frames were moved around using a positioning machine.

Looks as though this was a warm-up act by German company Micreon for their next trick: to engrave tiny lettering onto watch faces. Reminds me of the artist Willard Wigan, who creates sculptures too small for the human eye to see. One of his works that I saw was set on a plinth which was the eye of a needle, and the sculpture itself was of a ship whose ropes were made out of spiders web strands. He gives a fascinating talk here.

We’ll be sticking to the day job of choosing the best styles and designs that suit your eyes and wardrobe, which means you probably won’t find these bug-eyed glasses at Glasses Direct for the foreseeable future

Lot 364 at New York’s Antiquorum Auctioneers had a reserve of about $20,000 and by the end of the auction, bids had been received for up to the staggering amount of $2 million. But the highly popular auction for Mahatma Gandhi’s iconic glasses became controversial after various calls (bolstered by the Indian Government itself) that it was of questionable legality, that it threatened to remove a national treasure from India, and tampered with the Gandhi legacy. People were particularly incensed that the sale itself was a contradiction of Gandhi’s own anti-materialist principles.

The twist in the tale is that Vijay Mallya, an Indian liquor and airline executive who owns the company that makes Kingfisher beer, turned out to be the winner of the auction and subsequently declared that he will be returning the glasses to India for public display. Added to that, the happy ending was that Tushar Gandhi, 49, a great-grandson of Gandhi, hasbeen reported as saying “I am very happy now. Now the things will come back to India to where it rightly belongs.”

I recommend reading the NY times coverage of the exciting auction process and surrounding controversy here and here.

So what do you think? If the auction had not gone ahead, as everyone was calling for, the glasses would be probably still be hidden in the collection of filmmaker James Otis somewhere in Los Angeles. But now that it has gone ahead, the glasses are returned to delight crowds in a museum in India.

The Opus Design Award is a Japanese based competition for people wishing to ‘Deliberate Today through the subject of eyewear’ if you please.

There’s some lovely ideas. Who knows how many we’ll see on sale at Glasses Direct in the future?

This years winner was ‘Switch’, a photochromic pair of glasses where the entire pair change in sunlight, not just the lenses.

Project here

The silver prize went to the thought provoking idea of glasses for blind people – so that the glasses actually indicate the blindness instead of/as well as the stick:

Project here




These are slightly scary. Clamping to your face.

Project here

However the best for my money are these, if only for the dodgy translation. They’re glasses designed to counter the problem of the lenses steaming up when eating hot food.

When you eating hot food,
the misty in glesses is the most besetment for people
who put on a pair of glesses.
But it is discourteous that somebody usually shave the glesses.
Easy to shave the glesses not only well-mannered but also elegance

Project here

Here’s one that went from crazy design in 2002, into production

2008 Awards

Let us know any you think are particularly good.

Note: the main awards site does have a few broken links on it, but it’s worth persevering.

I’ve seen some fancy glasses around recently. I’ve already blogged about the asymmetric specs. But what about these:

The glasses are transparent, and you fill them with the ink that you want.

Created by the portuguese designer Luis Porem

Thought I’d just publish this little list of songs I found which are related to glasses and/or eyes. You will find a selection of them on our ‘on-hold’ music

Let me know if you can think of any others you can think of and I’ll try and include them on Radio GD too. For the record, I’m a Jimmy Cliff fan (go see the Harder They Come if you havent already. Think it’s on at the Barbican although i saw it at the Playhouse) so I can See Clearly Now is my favorite and has actually featured on our on-hold music since 2005!

Picture by Alicia

Although it doesn’t happen in most cases, we have heard of a few incidents where an optician refused to give a patient their prescription as they suspected it might be used to buy glasses elsewhere. Following the eye test, your optician is by law is obliged to give you a written copy of your prescription, however there’s a chance they’ll get grumpy at this request because they know it means you can now go off and buy your glasses online.

Top five things to tell an uppity optician (in no particular order):

1. It’s the law. You have to give me my written prescription immediately following my eye test.
2. My work needs it – a receipt isn’t enough for them to pay for my eye test.
3. My doctor wants a copy.
4. I want to buy my glasses from Glasses Direct (our favourite).
5. I want to frame it.

Remember – you’ve paid for your prescription. It’s yours, and you have every right to it.

We strongly recommend that you ask your optician to include your pupillary distance measurement in your prescription. It’s not part of the eye test itself – and they’re not legally bound to give it to you – but it’s worth getting if you can because it’s a key detail in achieving a perfect fit. They’ll either oblige, say no, or, in some cases, agree to take the measurement for a small fee.

Although I work for glasses direct, I still buy glasses elsewhere. Sometimes for mystery shopping, sometimes just for pleasure.

Of all the glasses shops I’ve been in, the selection that made me drool the most was Bromptons in Brighton. A beautiful boutique shop with lovely friendly staff, and a selection of the most wonderfully beautiful modern glasses, and a range of vintage weird specs.

If you love really beautiful glasses, and are in the south, give this place look.

I actually drove down there this weekend to buy a new pair from their shop (after I dropped my main pair in a river a couple of weeks ago). I said I was from Glasses Direct and they didn’t throw me out, which was nice.

We find the process of how prescription glasses are made fascinating and we think you may too after you read this article. The process of how prescription glasses are made is quite complex, though at Glasses Direct the prices are still lower than the price on the high street as you can see in our comparison table.

The more complex glasses prescriptions go through the following stages, although simpler prescriptions may skip some of the earlier stages:

Stage 1 – The laboratory select the lenses from a number of basic variants. These are pre-formed plastic blocks.

Stage 2 – The lenses are ‘blocked’ and semi-finished so they can be held in the generator – the machine that grinds the lens to shape.

Stage 3 – Your individual lenses are created from a template.

Stage 4 – They’re ‘generated’ – a process which grinds away much of the material of the lens, so that it is the right prescription and shape.

Stage 5 – Next they are polished so they become optically blemish-free.

Stage 6 – The lenses are then edged and marked up – which means their matched with their frame, and verified as being the right prescription.
Stage 7 – Lenses are cut to the right shape.
Stage 8 – Hand-edging removes any sharp edges and ensures a perfect fit with your glasses frame.
Stage 9 – Tints and coatings are added by dipping the lenses in dye or coating chemicals that bond to the lens surface
Stage 10 – The glasses are checked against your prescription for accuracy.

Further checking at Glasses Direct

When the glasses return from the laboratory, they go through a further set of stringent checks by our own quality assurance team who verify they’re the right frames with the correct prescription. We think this final stage is so important that we introduce you to the person who checked your glasses by including a card with your order showing the checks they completed. Once he or she is happy, your glasses are placed in their case with a cleaning cloth, plus any other items in your order, and dispatched via next day delivery. We use a courier so that we can trace the glasses right to your door.

Custom made prescription glasses from just £15!

Image from zach_manchester

In my last post I discussed some of the basic reasons that glasses are so expensive – cross subsidisation of the services offered by the glasses themselves (ie, they don’t charge the true cost for eye tests, but much more for the glasses). Also rents, expensive equipment, etc.

To try and stop people from going online to buy glasses many opticians will resist giving you your Pupillary Distance (This is, as it sounds, the distance between your pupils. I’ll write another blog post on this topic soon, and will be having a discussion with our Senior Optician about PDs which I’ll put up as a podcast).

To give you an idea of what many opticians feel about you, their customers, and the services that we and they provide, it can be worth eavesdropping on some of their conversations.

Optiboard is a forum for americans in the optical trade. There have been many threads on there about the online trade, and PD measurements.

Here is one about PD measurements: which many opticians are reluctant to give out.

“Online eyeglasses appeal to the cheapest and most moronic people out there. If I lose a few drooling idiots with no money to the online crowd, I’m not sure I even care.”

“Tell them to take their own. If they feel they do not need us, they they can do it themselves (note, I am no longer in the industry, so I can make statements like that).”

“My policy would (I haven’t been asked yet) No PD, period!”

“My policy is no PD, period.”

One member of the board tried to point out that by providing a service of measuring PDs etc, it could actually be a useful way of keeping customers returning to him, but he was in a very small minority being shouted down by the others who think that everyone who orders online is a moron, and any glasses bought online will be awful and won’t work.

We’ve had over 100,000 happy customers, and made over 200,000 pairs of glasses. If they didn’t work, we’d have been out of business a long time ago.

The industry is changing, and we’re part of that change. I wish the industry would realise that we’re not out to destroy anything, we’re just about giving a better deal. People, including myself, will still buy from the highstreet, and online. I buy books from amazon, my local book shop, and waterstones. I’ll buy glasses online, from the big chains, and from independant opticians (more of which in another post).

The difference is that I have 10 pairs of glasses, Two are from high street opticians, and are nearly double the cost of all the other 8 bought on-line put together!