Can I order my colored lenses with my glasses prescription?
Do you wear glasses and want to wear contact lenses or colored lenses? Wondering if you can use your glasses prescription to determine your correction? Our optician Sarah Marlien answers your questions in this article.
You may have already noticed that the correction for your left eye may be the same for your glasses and your colored lenses, while your right eye has a different correction. Is this a mistake? Well, not!
To understand this difference, you can do a very simple test with your glasses. Hold them away from their normal position, and you'll notice that your vision blurs... Your correction and the centering of your glasses depend, among other things, on the lens-to-eye distance. Just like when you hold a magnifying glass in your hand, there's only one distance that allows you to achieve the ideal graying.
What's the connection: we're talking about lenses and not magnifying glasses or glasses? Your lens is placed directly on your eye and therefore has a lens-to-eye distance of 0. The correction of your colored lenses is therefore recalculated based on this new parameter.
Let's take an example: if I have a myopia of -2,00, what about the correction of my colored lenses? Well, I'll wear the same corrective value. The same correction is maintained for glasses and colored lenses up to two diopters. If one of your eyes has a correction less than or equal to -2.00 for your glasses, you can choose the same correction for your lenses. However, if one of your eyes exceeds this correction, for example -2.50, you must take into account the lens-to-eye distance. The correction of your colored lenses will therefore be different from that of your glasses.
These are, of course, theoretical rules that allow you to optimize the estimated best correction. An adaptation and trial of corrective lenses are always necessary. In addition to checking your corrections for each eye, this will allow you to see if you tolerate these corrections well binocularly.
We recommend wearing daily corrective lenses to verify that the corrections for your left and right eyes are truly suitable for you. Testing your corrections with daily lenses will be less expensive than with annual lenses, for example.
A special case: people with astigmatism...
Just as wearing a colored lens directly on your eye affects your correction, whether your eye is wet affects your correction. Between the colored lens and your eye, there is the teardrop lens. This aqueous presence may be enough to compensate for a slight astigmatism.
This is why you may see a number in parentheses on your prescription but not see it on your lens prescription (up to an astigmatism of -0,75). Depending on the amount of astigmatism, we can define an average value for your correction. This value will provide greater flexibility in accommodation.
And forpresbyopia, is it the same correction?
Here again, this is more complicated because there are different systems for correcting distance and near vision, and it's obviously a matter of finding the one that best suits the wearer of colored lenses. But as a general rule, the required correction will be equivalent to that of the glasses. For the onset of presbyopia, you can start by switching and correcting one eye less than the other in order to have good distance vision in one eye and good near vision in the other.
In summary, the rules for lens correction are complex and really depend on your glasses prescription. These guidelines are designed to optimize visual comfort. For example, a myopic person wearing glasses will see objects smaller than with contact lenses because the distance between the lens and the eye is reduced...
So don't hesitate to ask us for advice on how to best adjust your correction to your eyeglass prescription, and to try daily corrective lenses several times; this will reduce the cost.