Prescription eyeglass construction & lens fabrication: how its made

Many, many people across the country and across the globe need some sort of vision correction in order to be able to see well enough to perform even some of life’s most basic functions. Things like reading a newspaper or deciphering the symbols on a traffic sign would be almost impossible for some people without the help of corrective lenses – what’s surprising though is that with all of the people who have an inherent need for corrective lenses, very few actually know how their prescription glasses are actually put together. Making corrective lenses actually begins at the point of the eye exam, a person is examined by an eye care professional to determine what their prescription is – and then that information is sent off to a lab. Once the numbers are in the technician’s hand, he or she will determine what type of prescription blank is closest to the corrective requirements. The prescription blanks are preformed lenses that are flat on one side and curved on the other and most commonly made of impact resistant plastic. The thickness of the blank selected will be determined by the corrective needs of the individual patient. The prescription lens blank is expertly ground done by the technician until it will provide the corrective properties that are needed by the wearer. Once the appropriate curvature for the prescription ahs been reached, the edges of the lens are then ground down to fit the frames that were pre chosen by the patient. It’s at this point in the process that the lenses will be specialized if necessary with things like tinting or UV protection. Then lenses need to fit securely into the chosen frames so it often necessary to heat them in order to make them pliable before insertion into the frames occurs. Once the lenses are securely installed into the frames it’s time for everything to be cleaned up, packaged and shipped out to your eye care professional for you to pick up. Though the process doesn’t sound incredibly difficult, it is a very exact science – even a minor error on the part of the technician could render the glasses useless to the patient, so the utmost care and precision must be exacted with every single lens that goes into the grinding machine. Once you get your glasses, you must exact great care in making sure that they don’t become damaged. Some frames are made to handle abuse, they are flexible and can almost bounce back from instances that would have destroyed and older set of frames – even though the technology with lenses has come a long way they still aren’t capable of holding up well to excessive abuse. If your lenses get scraped up or heavily scratched, it could be back to square one, prescription lenses can’t be ground down to remove marring because that would end up changing the prescription of the lenses and therefore effect the vision of the owner. If you exercise the caution that you should when wearing your prescription glasses, damaging them shouldn’t be a very big concern but if you are careless in either the handling or cleaning of your prescription lenses you may find that you need a new pair much sooner than would normally be necessary. Prescription glasses can be costly because of the work that goes into producing them properly, most people can’t afford to be replacing a pair of prescription glasses more frequently than is necessary as a result in a change to their prescription. So think about all the care and hard work that goes into crafting your prescription glasses before you do any undue damage to them through improper handling.