As you get older the lenses in your eyes become hardened as they lose their elasticity. This makes it ever increasingly more difficult to focus on small close up things, such as your book or computer screen. This condition is called presbyopia, just like as you get older you sometimes lose your hearing (presbycusis) it is perfectly natural, and just due to a few years worth of wear and tear.
The temptation is to just pick up a pair of cheap reading spectacles, costing from as little as a £1, and there you are ready to go. Hence their nickname ‘ready readers’. They are cheap to buy, you don’t need an eye test and readily available. Well that is where the advantages stop.
As they are cheap in price (ranging usually from £1 to around £18), they are often poorly made by mass production. This means you will often hear complaints of lose screws, broken arms and mostly uncomfortable fitting glasses. Buying ready readers off the shelf leads to damage to not only the glasses themselves but also the lenses, pitting and scratches being the most common.
Custom made reading glasses can be made from as little as £20 including a spectacle frame of your choice and lenses with the correct magnification and lens centres set exactly for your pupil distance.
Indeed to buy ready readers you do not need an eye test, however this means that your pupillary distance (gap between your pupils) is not measured, and therefore your lenses cannot be centred around your eye. This means the optical centres are not correct, a normal pupillary distance is on average 62mm. However everyone is different and they can range from 54mm to 76mm). Even the slightest amount out, will be magnified with these lenses, causing all sorts of problems as our brains try and work out what is going wrong. It can cause eye strain, headaches, dizzy spells, double-vision or feelings of nausea. When buying custom made reading glasses all of these measurements are correct for your eyes.
As they are picked up off the shelf, there are often two options available: a metal like frame and a plastic frame. Each come with their disadvantages! The metal frames are often made with nickel alloy, which bends out of shape easily and can cause skin allergies. The plastic ones are often designed very narrow, and put pressure on your temples and ears, causing discomfort and the spreading out of the arms would loosen the screws.
For £20 you can have a massive range of different colours- red glasses, blue glasses, big pink glasses, small frames and big frames made to your exact reading needs.
Reading glasses are a great aid to magnify written content. It shouldn’t be right that the reason people don’t buy proper prescription glasses is cost, and we try to keep all our glasses at a low price giving people a choice to treat their eyes.