When your glasses call for new lenses, you can trust Eye Works. At Eye Works, your Eyewear is crafted using some of the best in lens technology offered by the industry leaders. These lenses include Digitally Backed Surfaced progressive lenses that offer not only a wider reading area, but less peripheral distortion as well. The Ultra-Thin & Light aspheric lenses are recommended with higher prescription applications.

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Why choosing the right eyeglass lenses is so important

When buying eyeglasses, the frame you choose is important to both your appearance and your comfort when wearing glasses. But the eyeglass lenses you choose influence four factors: appearance, comfort, vision, and safety.

A common mistake people often make when buying eyeglasses is not spending enough time considering their choices of eyeglass lens materials, designs and coatings.

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The following information applies to all prescription lenses for glasses — whether you need single vision lenses to correct nearsightedness, farsightedness, and/or astigmatism, or you need progressive lenses, bifocals or other multifocal lenses to also correct presbyopia.

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Eyeglass lens materials - features and benefits

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Glass lenses - In the early days of vision correction, all eyeglass lenses were made of glass. Although glass lenses offer exceptional optics, they are heavy and can break easily, potentially causing serious harm to the eye or even loss of an eye. For these reasons, glass lenses are no longer widely used for eyeglasses.

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Plastic lenses - In 1947, the Armorlite Lens Company in California introduced the first lightweight plastic eyeglass lenses. The lenses were made of a plastic polymer called CR-39, an abbreviation for "Columbia Resin 39," because it was the 39th formulation of a thermal-cured plastic developed by PPG Industries in the early 1940s.

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Because of its lightweight (about half the weight of glass), low cost and excellent optical qualities, CR-39 plastic remains a popular material for eyeglass lenses even today.

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Polycarbonate lenses - In the early 1970s, Gentex Corporation introduced the first polycarbonate lenses for safety glasses. Later that decade and in the 1980s, polycarbonate lenses became increasing popular and remain so today.

Originally developed for helmet visors for the Air Force, for "bulletproof glass" for banks and other safety applications, polycarbonate is lighter and significantly more impact-resistant than CR-39 plastic, making it a preferred material for children's eyewear, safety glasses, and sports eyewear.

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A newer lightweight eyeglass lens material with similar impact-resistant properties as polycarbonate is called Trivex (PPG Industries), which was introduced for eyewear in 2001. A potential visual advantage of Trivex is its higher Abbe value (see below).

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High-index plastic lenses - In the past 20 years, in response to the demand for thinner, lighter eyeglasses, a number of lens manufacturers have introduced high-index plastic lenses. These lenses are thinner and lighter than CR-39 plastic lenses because they have a higher index of refraction (see below) and may also have a lower specific gravity.