Goodwin College Student's Blog

Crooked Glasses; Can Effect More Than Just Your Appearance
Rebecca-Lyn Roberts ABOC, NCLEC.


When was the last time you brought your car for a tune up? The same question should be asked about your glasses as well.  Our glasses, need routine care just as our cars do!

How often do we accidentally fall asleep with our eyewear on our face? How often do we drop or accidentally sit on our glasses? Bringing your glasses to a local optician for regular adjustments can save eyestrain, headaches, dizziness and can all around allow you to have better vision out of your eyewear.

What is an Optician?
1: a maker of or dealer in optical items and instruments
2: a person who reads prescriptions for visual correction, orders lenses, and dispenses eyeglasses and contact lenses, preforms adjustments to eyewear, fits contact lenses
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Opticians can be found at your family eye doctor, privately owned optical shops, and even large chain stores including but not limited to Lens Crafters, BJs, Costco, Target and Walmart. Some optical stores will not adjust outside frames and it is important to know most have a policy that they are not responsible for any breakage to outside frames when adjusting them.  But, with today’s world it is common to find an optical shop within a five-mile proximity, so it is important to bring eye wear in for routine inspections and adjustments.  

What Does Misalignment Actually Do to My Prescription?
When your glasses are first given to you by an optician, the glasses are and should be throughouly adjusted to you to ensure your lenses are aligned correctly with your facial features as well as your prescription.  In order to see light passes through the optical center, through the pupil and focuses in the back of your eye.  If this is off center in any way your vision can be obscured, and eye fatigue, dizziness, headaches, and general discomfort can occur. Your prescription is centered in your frame using a measurement we call Pupillary Distance, this is the distance in-between your two eyes, and also, your optical center height, this is where the center of your eye sits in the frame. So, if the glasses become misaligned, you are not looking through the full strength of your eyeglass prescription. Wearing progressive lenses; also known as invisible lined multifocal lenses, that are misaligned can cause tremendous amounts of eyestrain and difficulty seeing at fixed distances.

Works Cited

Steiner, J. (n.d.). Can Crooked Glasses Make Your Eyesight Worse? Retrieved March 09, 2018, from http://endmyopia.org/crooked-glasses-worse-eyesight/

Optician. (n.d.). Retrieved March 09, 2018, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/optician

Crooked glasses. (2009, February 18). Retrieved March 09, 2018, from https://mindflowers.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/crooked-glasses/

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