For anyone that doesn’t wear glasses and doesn’t know how they’re made, this is how, for myopia.
Frames are one thing, they are made by Luxottica for all brands and are overpriced because of their monopoly. They’re not bad quality, just overpriced. They have to be light because you wear them all day, and they have to be resistant in case of damage. They also have to fit your face and that’s why they’re made of plastic that gets malleable when heated up.
Lenses however are another thing entirely. Not only do you have myopia correction, you have astigmatism correction too for some people as well as a third correction that I forget. You have the lens thickness index, if you don’t want them to be super thick and stick out of the frames. You have the view angle, so that you can look everywhere on the lens, I.e. All of it is useful and not just the centre. They also treat the lenses against scratches, water, fog, etc. Which works good for a bit but is a godsend when you wear them 24/7. And of course they have to know your eye distance so they focus the lenses on the right part so you can look out without a headache, so it feels natural.
And that’s just the “basic” myopia lenses. But remember I talked about looking out through the whole lens and not just in the middle of it? If you’ve seen glasses recently, you’ve seen that the sockets in the frames are not entirely straight, but they curve back on the edges. This means we’re not making a disc where the correction is the same everywhere, we are making a sphere with different corrections because some surface of the lens is closer to your eyes and some is farther; the math is increasingly complicated for this shape.
Oh and you have to get the lens right the first time otherwise the shop will send it back which costs you money to fix. And I’m out of glasses every time you make adjustments to them.
And you have to do it twice, because we have two eyes, and they might not have the same correction at all.
I also believe lenses are a bit overpriced, because there’s not many labs making them, but it is definitely valuable when you get all that and it is not something you can just do in your backyard.
For anyone that doesn’t wear glasses and doesn’t know how they’re made, this is how, for myopia.
Frames are one thing, they are made by Luxottica for all brands and are overpriced because of their monopoly. They’re not bad quality, just overpriced. They have to be light because you wear them all day, and they have to be resistant in case of damage. They also have to fit your face and that’s why they’re made of plastic that gets malleable when heated up.
Lenses however are another thing entirely. Not only do you have myopia correction, you have astigmatism correction too for some people as well as a third correction that I forget. You have the lens thickness index, if you don’t want them to be super thick and stick out of the frames. You have the view angle, so that you can look everywhere on the lens, I.e. All of it is useful and not just the centre. They also treat the lenses against scratches, water, fog, etc. Which works good for a bit but is a godsend when you wear them 24/7. And of course they have to know your eye distance so they focus the lenses on the right part so you can look out without a headache, so it feels natural.
And that’s just the “basic” myopia lenses. But remember I talked about looking out through the whole lens and not just in the middle of it? If you’ve seen glasses recently, you’ve seen that the sockets in the frames are not entirely straight, but they curve back on the edges. This means we’re not making a disc where the correction is the same everywhere, we are making a sphere with different corrections because some surface of the lens is closer to your eyes and some is farther; the math is increasingly complicated for this shape.
Oh and you have to get the lens right the first time otherwise the shop will send it back which costs you money to fix. And I’m out of glasses every time you make adjustments to them.
And you have to do it twice, because we have two eyes, and they might not have the same correction at all.
I also believe lenses are a bit overpriced, because there’s not many labs making them, but it is definitely valuable when you get all that and it is not something you can just do in your backyard.