Why do I need reading glasses?

At some stage in our lives, we all will find reading, or carrying out other close-distanced tasks, to be less simple. What exactly is it that causes this and is there something we can do about it?

The simple answer is – growing up! The Optical term for this is Presbyopia. Translated from its original Latin, this means “Old Sight” and it happens due to the growing and thickening of the lens inside the eye.

At birth, the Optical lens is very flexible. The eye muscles are able to adjust accordingly to change the power of the eye, allowing us to see both near and far; similar to a camera lens. As we age, the lens thickens and is no longer as flexible. By the time we reach around 45 years old, it has thickened sufficiently for us to find near vision is no longer as simple as it was – people often notice this by having to hold books etc further away – we often hear of people whose arms are no longer long enough to read! (For short-sighted people, they start to find taking their glasses off to read helps – but let’s not get bogged down in details like that!)

A healthy diet, less TV, working out – will make NO difference at all! These changes will happen no matter what you do. How do we fix it? We examine your eyes and we prescribe spectacles to give you back your normality again – simple really!

So when your arms are getting too short, or you find that the lighting just isn’t good enough (!), we can guarantee that it’s actually your eyes telling you that you need an eye examination at Blur.