Some people sell glasses. I wanted to make glasses. And I don’t mean choosing a frame from a shelf, putting some very good lenses into it and calling that making glasses. As complicated and interesting as the lenses can be, somebody else has still designed and manufactured the frame before
Glasses can cost less than a weekly food shop or about the same as a short break on a Greek island, and people quite reasonably want to know whether spending more actually gets them anything better. The annoying answer is that it depends. I’ve seen expensive glasses that were thoroughly
Most people think the result of an eye examination is a prescription. A few numbers, some letters and perhaps a recommendation for new glasses if those numbers have changed. The prescription is important, obviously, but it is only one answer to one question. By the time you leave the testing
One of the most common things people say when they bring an old pair of glasses into Doctor Oculus is, “I was told nobody could reglaze these.” This is usually followed by, “Apparently they might break.” Occasionally, that is completely true. Some frames are too brittle, too badly damaged or
There is a strange thing about glasses. People will tolerate them being uncomfortable for years. They put up with sore ears at the end of the day, push the frame back up their nose every few minutes and accept that one side sits lower than the other. Some move their
Doctor Oculus wasn’t created because I thought Birmingham desperately needed another opticians. There were already plenty of those, ranging from the very clinical to the sort of place where you half expect somebody to whisper the price of a frame while presenting it on a velvet cushion. If that is
Very few people walk into an opticians saying, “I’d love a pair of varifocals.” They usually arrive after several months of increasingly elaborate denial. Restaurant menus have become harder to read, the phone is held at a distance previously reserved for suspicious parcels and, for reasons nobody can explain, every
Anyone who has bought glasses online will probably have encountered the letters PD. Pupillary distance. It is often presented as the essential measurement needed to position your lenses correctly, sometimes with an accompanying tutorial involving a ruler, a mirror and the sort of facial concentration normally reserved for defusing explosives.
“My new glasses just don’t feel right.” It’s one of the most common things opticians hear. Sometimes they’re blurry. Sometimes they feel strange. Sometimes they cause headaches, make reading harder than it should be, or never seem quite as comfortable as the old pair they were meant to replace. The
