What Is Presbyopia?

This may shock you, but as much as we love designing wild as hell eyewear, we also completely nerd out over the science behind why you need eyewear in the first place. Knowing all there is to know helps us make very good decisions about the quality of our lenses so you can focus less on the technical happenings inside your eyeballs and more on the fun experience of picking out eyewear you could wear to the Met Gala.

Anyway, now that we have that out of the way, let's talk a little bit about how one may notice they have Presbyopia. Common Presbyopia symptoms include (and are very much limited to):

● Turning 40! Being in your 50’s! Entering your 60’s! General aging!
● Blurred vision while reading at a normal reading distance.
● Needing to hold reading material at an arms-length in order to focus on small print.
● Eyestrain or headaches after reading (and not just after reading the news, all humans experience severe headaches after that.)
● Developing a true hatred for dim lighting because you can’t see sh*t.

PSA: Presbyopia is a normal refractive eye condition, not an eye disease. AND NO! Risk factors do not include going blind because Presbyopia is less interested in progressing and more of a plateau kinda guy. Even though you are not in any immediate danger, we (and all eye doctors out there) recommend that if you begin experiencing any of these very normal symptoms, you schedule yourself a comprehensive eye exam. 

Shalt you find out Presbyopia is at play, your eye doctor might explain that as our eyes age, our lenses naturally lose flexibility, and the eye’s ability to bend light in order to focus on things diminishes causing blurred vision. Your doctor also may just look up at you and shout in an old-timey voice, “Refractive error! No light rays for you!” In either case, your options for correcting this refractive error are bountiful.

Unfortunately, no amount of eye yoga (yes that’s a thing) can bring back your eye health from the middle ages. However, we hope you’re a person that enjoys options because when it comes to how one can treat Presbyopia, there are many. Let us count the ways.

1. Refractive surgery
There are a handful of different types of refractive surgeries you can have. Without getting too in the weeds, in all cases, going under the knife is meant to change the shape of your cornea to improve close-up vision in your non-dominant eye. However, even after surgery, you could still require eyeglasses for close-up work.

2. Lens implants
Next up! Replacing your lenses with synthetic ones. Several types of implants are available for correcting presbyopia, but beware that lens implants can impact the quality of your near vision, and you may still require reading glasses.

3. Contact lenses
Hello monovision lenses! With monovision contacts, you use one contact lens for distance vision in your dominant eye, and the other contact lens for close-up vision. You can also wear bifocal lenses in both eyes or a multifocal contact lens in one eye and a contact lens good for distance in the other. In this case, you would use both eyes for distance and one eye for reading. Got that?

4. Eyeglasses
OR! You can see things the way we do and just head straight to the glasses
counter for a pair of readers, bifocals, trifocals, or progressive lenses. If you have no other vision impairments, a pair of readers will do the trick. If you already have a prescription to correct vision for distance, we recommend introducing yourself to bifocal lenses. If you already have bifocals, trifocals can be helpful in offering multiple powers for distance, middle distance, and close-up vision. Progressive lenses (aka all-day readers) are also a great option if you’re good in the distance department but need a little help with computer-distance and close-up work or reading corrections. We highly recommend reading about our lens offerings (equipt with helpful diagrams) here.

Should you choose the path of righteous eyewear, the fun has just begun. But seriously though, we know showing signs of aging isn’t the greatest feeling, but you can’t control time or gravity, or what’s going on inside your eyeballs, so don’t be too hard on yourself. The great news is that you are in very good company (aka all other humans your age) and you also have a very good friend in helping you find incredibly high-quality, (not to mention scratch-resistant + anti-reflective) lenses and compliment-inducing frames, us!

If you plan to initially rage against the machine of aging, may we suggest something young and fun like our Breaking News frame? Or maybe you want to embrace this moment with something sophisticated but stunning like the Wisecracker frame? Honestly, life is a bit of a crapshoot, so we can also see you considering grabbing life by the eyeballs with our outrageous, one-of-a-kind Eye of the Beholder frames. Whatever you decide to do, we are so Clearly here for you, as your friend in Pres·by·o·pi·a.