I got my first pair of glasses when I was in third grade. It was a revelation. As I heard someone else say about getting their first glasses, suddenly the "trees had leaves!" Without vision correction, I see a tree as a mass of green. With correction, there are individual leaves fluttering. It was great.
The next day, at school, I was surprised to find that some kids tease kids who wear glasses. Yes, I was actually teased for my glasses, those amazing gray kitty-cats that allowed me to read what was on the chalkboard for the first time. I was thrilled with my glasses, ready to share the miracle with everyone I met, and they just thought I looked funny. It was confusing.
Fast-forward to age twelve, about to start junior high. My mother told me I could get contacts. I remember one summer day shortly before my contacts appointment, standing in the hot driveway of our split-level house, glasses fogged up and slipping down my sweaty nose, saying, "I can't wait until I get contacts."
Well. Contacts were another story, and nothing like the pure joy of a third-grader being finally able to see. I was squeamish about touching my eyeballs, so it was months before I could put in my contacts in five minutes or less. But I did get there. With the exception of a couple of brief periods of experimentation with returning to glasses, I've worn contacts ever since (as for how long that has been, well, I was born two years after Barack Obama).
I rarely had a spare pair of glasses. Even if you wear contacts, it's nice to have a pair of glasses for those occasions when contacts don't work well. But I didn't want to pay the money to have both. I guess some people have one pair of glasses and manage to hold on to them for years, but I tend to misplace or break mine. (Okay, so maybe dropping my glasses on the floor by the bed when I'm ready to quit reading and fall asleep, is not the best storage process.)
So, I wore contacts and that was it. As I've gotten older, though, I'm having trouble reading things close up. If I have my contacts in, I can't read pill bottles at all, and even books are troublesome. Contacts no longer correct my vision as well as glasses do. With glasses, I can still read fairly well, so I started thinking--do I keep wearing contacts and get reading glasses too, or do I switch back to prescription glasses and ditch the contacts?
Enter Zenni Optical. A few months ago, my husband Fred (as in Flintstone) heard some guy on the radio being interviewed about buying prescription glasses online. This guy said that although glasses can cost hundreds of dollars if bought in an optician's shop, they are actually very cheap to make. If you have your prescription, have an idea of what size frames you want (which you can figure out by measuring some old frames), and know your PD (Pupillary Distance, which you can measure yourself at home) then you can buy cheap glasses online.
Fred doesn't wear glasses, but he told me about this. I promptly got online and looked into it. It's true. It's great. Nobody believes me, but it's great.
My son Alan also wears glasses. He has a mild prescription and just wears them for driving or seeing the board in school. At the time of my Great Online Glasses Revelation, he had one pair of glasses, which were held together by tape because they broke and I hadn't felt like paying for new ones yet.
I browsed online, found some sites, but kept going back to Zenni Optical. They seemed to combine the cheapest prices with the largest selection and most information on each pair (measurements, pictures of each color offered, etc.). I've still only ordered from Zenni.
Fred measured Alan's PD according to some instructions he found online (he used a yardstick with centimeters on it because we couldn't find a ruler, and it worked okay, so I guess it isn't that tough). I decided to test the online glasses process by ordering a cheap pair and seeing if it worked.
I ordered Alan one pair of wire-rims, the absolute cheapest possible. Frames and lenses together were eight bucks, shipping was five, so the total cost was thirteen bucks for a pair of prescription glasses.
A couple of weeks later, the glasses arrived. They were fine, only problem being that Alan said they were just a little small for him (but still wearable). Anti-scratch coating is included, thin lenses are included. You can pay extra for ultra-thin lenses, but Alan's prescription isn't strong enough to warrant that. You can also pay five bucks extra for anti-reflection coating, which I did not do on this first, test pair.
So, I decided Alan could keep these as his backup glasses, and I'd get him some more. I ordered him three more pairs--one pair of rimless, just to see how those worked out, and one pair like the ones he already had but a smidge larger, and one pair of prescription sunglasses for driving. I got anti-reflection coating on these (except the sunglasses, where it doesn't apply).
All arrived in good shape in hard plastic cases, all worked fine. Cool.
My experience with glasses for myself: I had Fred do my PD with his trusty yardstick and ordered one pair of test glasses for myself. I played it safe and got a pretty little pair of gold half-rims, very normal-looking glasses, and I did pay extra for anti-reflection coating and the upgrade to the next thinnest lenses. Even with upgrades and my not getting the cheapest frames, the total for the pair including shipping was something under forty bucks.
They worked fine, but at this point, I was having fun with this and wanted more! more! glasses. I had always wanted a pair of fun-looking, funky glasses, but of course, if you just have one pair that cost over a hundred dollars and you wear them all the time, you don't want to experiment too much, because what if you hate them and are stuck with them?
I also liked the idea of prescription sunglasses, which I had never been able to afford before.
So, I ordered myself three more pairs. Total cost? I ordered Alan's three and my three together and I didn't figure out what the breakdown was between Alan's and mine, but the total cost of the order was $127. All had anti-reflection coating (except sunglasses). ( I didn't upgrade to thinner lenses this time, and with our prescriptions, that worked out okay.) $127 for six pairs of prescription glasses, including shipping. I was in heaven.
I have prescription sunglasses now, and I've learned that they are great for swimming. Before, I had to either swim without contacts and never be able to see anything, or swim with contacts and not be able to get any water in my face. With the prescription sunglasses, not only are my eyes shaded from the sun, but I can see everything and then if I want to get my head wet, I can take them off and set them by the side of the pool for a while.
I think, in order to make this online glasses thing work, you have to want to do it this way. You have to think it's fun. I am not a shopper. I hate walking around in an optician's shop looking at glasses, because people keep offering to help me, and I feel stupid looking for very long so I quickly settle on a pair just to get out of there. But I happen to love spending hours looking through internet sites finding just the right thing, so the online glasses work great for me.
Yes, there's a possibility of a pair not working out, and there's no one to take them to if that happens. I did receive one pair of acetate frames that are a little bent--if I put them on, one side looks higher than the other. I have read that I can take them to an eye place and they can heat them and put them back in shape, I just haven't tried it yet. This particular pair of glasses cost about twenty bucks (I won't count shipping since they came in an order with other glasses, and Zenni charges a flat shipping rate no matter how many you order) so even if it costs me something to get them straightened, they still won't be too terribly expensive.
I've learned from each pair I've ordered, so now I have an idea of what size and type of frames I like best, what tint of sunglasses, and so on. That first pair I got turned out to be a little large, so I guess they were a trial pair. But I can still put them on in an emergency (I have been known to misplace ALL my glasses).
After playing with glasses for a while, I've also learned that I still like the freedom of contacts. I will probably go ahead and order some new contacts soon and try using a combination of contacts and reading glasses, but it's nice to have several pairs of glasses to fall back on.
(Speaking of reading glasses--check out: http://www.peeperspecs.com/Products/Peepers_reading_glasses.asp
And
http://www.eyebobs.com/ )
Here's the craziest part of all this: no one believes me. I look at people now and think, Hmm, I wonder how much they paid for their glasses? I try to tell people, and Fred tries to tell people. People assume that glasses have some magic medicinal quality, that they have to be checked and fitted by a doctor or they are no good and will ruin your eyes. No good. Online glasses can't be any good. We hear that over and over.
People, think. YOU are the judge of your glasses. Either you can see, or you can't. The eye doctor doesn't examine your eyes with an instrument and then give you a prescription--he/she has you READ THINGS and asks you how well you can see them, and THEN gives you a prescription. If you can see out of 'em, they're good glasses. I think lenses are made by machine, anyway. They aren't carved by hand by some artisan hiding in the back of your optician's shop.
As for frames, well, if you are capable of judging the quality of the living room couch you picked out, or of the shirt you are wearing, without expert help, why can't you tell whether the frames you have on are an acceptable quality? Anyone can pick up a pair of drugstore reading glasses and think, yuck, flimsy, so the opposite is true, too--you can tell if the quality of the frames seems okay.
I got to thinking the other day--reading glasses are actually prescription glasses, too. You can buy those off the rack at your local discount store, but they really are prescription glasses--1.25, 1.50, and so on. They can sell them off the rack because so many people need those particular prescriptions, the same in both eyes, once they hit a certain age. The only reason you can't buy ALL glasses off the rack is that the huge number of possible prescriptions prohibits it--you'd need a warehouse to display all the possiblities.
Still, nobody believes. Fred worked the elections yesterday and talked glasses with the woman working next to him. He told her I could get prescription glasses online for 25 bucks delivered. She said that can't be right, they must not be any good, because the glasses she was wearing cost 250 dollars. Okay. Whatever.
You can get a pair of prescription eyeglasses from Zenni for thirteen bucks delivered, if you pick out the 8-dollar frames and don't get any upgrades. Sure seems to me that it's worth buying one pair to see if it works.
I don't usually do anything resembling a customer review, so I feel kind of silly writing all this. No, I don't work for Zenni.
It must come from all those years of wearing one pair of glasses day after day, or wearing a pair mended with tape until we could afford another pair. As a kid, I wore gray plastic kitty-cats, then dark brown plastic kitty-cats. Then everyone was wearing wire-rims--only nerds wore plastic--so I finally got a pair of wire-rims, even though I didn't like them very much. I remember one of the "cool" girls looking at me scornfully and saying, "At least you finally got wires." I hope she is currently paying hundreds of dollars for her glasses.
Whenever I got a pair of glasses, I knew I was going to have to live with them for years to come, because gosh, who could afford more than one pair of glasses?
Buying cheap glasses online is SO COOL!
(Additional Info: I did have to figure out our prescriptions by searching online under "Understanding eyeglass prescriptions," and I also had to figure out how ours fit with what I read online. Our eye doc scribbles and leaves out periods. In one case, he even left out a minus sign, and Zenni emailed me and pointed out that the prescription was probably wrong. So I got it figured out. And I would recommend a ruler for the PD--I think we lucked out with the yardstick.)
