Have you ever left the optometrist’s office with new glasses, and your eyes hurting like never before?

“Oh you’ll get used to it”, they tell you.

If you were to ask a sagely bearded eye guru, he’d probably tell you that you should go home and measure your own focal plane error and that you might have way more diopters than you need.

Maybe.  Also look for diopter ratio changes, or changes to cylinder correction.

This is the sort of thing where you either trust the lens seller (who after getting your money has little incentive to troubleshoot), or you go learn things about vision biology and optics.  You might shake your head at these options, but consider this:

The lens seller is most likely going to sell you the highest amount of diopters you can tolerate.

As short term symptom fixes go, that’s the right approach.  You’ll see razor sharp in all conditions, you’re less likely to come back unhappy about blur, and those diopters will last you at least a year, before you need more.

That approach doesn’t take into account vision biology and how minus lenses cause more myopia.

A coffee shop barista loading up your drink with sugar isn’t trying to get you healthy.  They want you to enjoy the drink, smile, and come back to spend money again.  Consider the motive, Watson.  Buying glasses has nothing to do with health, and everything to do with you being short-term happy, and coming back for more later.

And sometimes that doesn’t work out too well:

Learn and fix thineself.

Look at that.

And this sort of scenario of new glasses and your eyes hurting happens more times than you’d want to imagine.  Dialing up the diopters to 11 may work out short term (while increasing your myopia), or it might not even do that.  If you’re sensitive to hyperopic defocus in particular, you’ll literally feel the squeeze of the extra diopters.

Not ideal.  And yet if you don’t research and thread the tiny needle, you won’t know why.  And they sure won’t tell you.

Got your own stories?  Send me an e-mail or post in our Facebook group, so we can share with everyone!

Cheers,

-Jake