Common Issues With Varifocals & How To Overcome Them
Varifocals are designed to give you clear vision at all distances—from reading a book to seeing down the road. When customised correctly, they can eliminate the need for constant switching between reading glasses and distance glasses, making your day-to-day life considerably easier.
But with great promise often comes frustration. Why do you hear of so many people struggling with varifocals, ending up disappointed and sometimes switching back to single-vision lenses?
There’s usually a good reason for that, and as we often tell our new varifocal customers at our dispensing opticians in Digbeth, it’s all about getting the right fit and design. Is your optician skilled at tailoring varifocals? Did you even buy your varifocals from an optician or a sales assistant? Here are some common issues with varifocals and how to overcome them.
Common Varifocal Issues
"Moving my head makes the world look like it's swimming"
"I can't get the entire width of my screen in focus"
"I have to lower my chin to see clearly in the distance"
"I have to lift my chin high up to be able to read clearly"
The Solution
When we talk about varifocals in Digbeth, we often compare them to buying off-the-rack clothing versus something custom-tailored.
Tailored varifocals are designed from the ground up to fit your unique vision needs and lifestyle, which almost eliminate all of those annoyances that led you to search for the reason you're having problems with your varifocals. In short, we think there are five key steps to Varifocal nirvana.
1) Choose The Right Lens Design
Varifocals come in many types, designed by different manufacturers with varying technologies. The right choice depends on your prescription, lifestyle, and budget.
There is a mind-blowing array of options and outcomes, it’s vital that the correct type of varifocal is selected for you, and this is determined using the results of a lifestyle consultation from your dispensing optician. Some designs make driving vision easier, while others prioritise book reading.
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2) Accurate Tailoring & Measuring
There is a lot more to a lens than a PD (pupil distance) and your varifocals are only as good as the measurements taken. We take precise readings of your eyes including relative height to the lens, the distance from the eye to the lens, your posture, how your chosen frames sit on your face and even the distance and angle you like to hold your phone or book.
Often, we ‘compensate’ the measurements too, that is to say, to use figures that are outside of the true objective measurements, to help you adapt or to account for lifestyle parameters - that's where having a lot of tailoring experience comes in handy.
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3) Using A Suitable Glasses Frame
Most modern glasses frames are suitable for varifocal lenses, but not every combination of frame style and facial anatomy is.
If your glasses are too wide, have a large frontal wrap, or are sitting too high up or too low down, then even the world's best varifocal design and measurements will produce undesirable results.
This is again the role of a good dispensing optician to guide you into something that achieves your desired look and function.
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4) Invest In Quality Lenses
Yes, varifocals can be pricey, especially with thinning or photochromic lenses. But quality matters. That doesn’t mean everybody needs to go premium, smaller prescriptions will still benefit from the best lenses but they will gain less compared to a high prescription.
We always recommend going for the best lens you can afford to give the most scope to use all the tailoring tools we have available to ensure the lens lives up to the hype rather than becoming a varifocal horror story.
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5) Are Varifocals The Right Lens For You?
If I had 50p for everytime a customer came to me unhappy with their old varifocals because it was the wrong lens to be dispensed - I'd be Coinstar's biggest customer.
What is the best lens for office work, hobbyists or workshop warriors? An occupational lens like our Cyberlens, not a varifocal.
What about reading in bed? Clue - not a varifocal.
Tailored well, varifocals are a versatile lens for general use. When your needs become more defined there are other, often less costly, lenses that will do the job a lot better.
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The Last Word
Even with perfectly tailored varifocals, there’s usually a short adaptation period. It’s normal because your brain needs time to adjust to the new way of processing vision. But if you follow the steps outlined above, you’re set for a seamless transition into the clear, versatile world that varifocals can offer.
Tailoring varifocals is our specialism at Doctor Oculus. We're the super experienced and disgustingly well qualified dispensing opticians based in Digbeth, with years of experience getting great results for fussy pairs of eyes. We like to think we bring our expertise and our ethos of ethical and affordable consultation to the fine people of Birmingham and beyond.
We back all that big talk up with a 2-year warranty against any lens damage. So not only are you getting some of the world's best varifocal lenses tailoring, you're also guaranteed to receive free replacements if they fall ill of some foul fate that damages the lenses.