The everyday inconvenience of specs

Glasses are the ultimate in visual convenience. Whenever your eyes need a bit of extra support, they’re there to help you out—if you can find them.

As you can see, or not see at the moment, this on/off vison has its drawbacks. One of the main ones being that they don’t correct your vision permanently, but rather tie you to a flimsy medical device that you have to wear on your face.

As they are a temporary external aid—that have changed little since their development several centuries ago—glasses come with many such inconveniences that affect daily life.

It would take too long to list them all here. But let’s look at the ones we believe to be at the top of the list:

Changing weather

The weather changes constantly, and as they are chiefly comprised of glass, so do glasses.

Any slight shift in temperature, a sudden shower, or even just a light breeze can disrupt them and remind you they’re there. And so it’s not like you can just put them on and then go about getting on with the rest of your day.

It’s also not only changes in the outdoor environment. Anyone who’s gone from a cool conservatory to a hot kitchen or a steamy bathroom knows this well: in a flash, everything can disappear as your specs have fogged up and left you grasping at anyone or anything around you.

Constant instability

Try and put anything on your nose and expect it to stay there for a while, and you’re going to run into a few problems.

The first problem is the evidence. You don’t get away with using your nose as a pillar to prop your designer glimmers up—it has enough jobs to do. When you’re wearing them, rightly so they can be uncomfortable and add pressure to the face. And when you’re not, you get to enjoy two red marks and even bruises where the nose pads meet the side of your nose.

The second problem is your whole body becomes a balancing apparatus for your frames. When driving, playing with the kids, or just walking down the street, your glasses are constantly shifting and causing you to constantly have one eye on them no matter what you’re doing.

On top of that, you also know what unstable glasses means: a lot of face touching.

The little inconveniences

Some of the ways glasses impact your life the most are ways you don’t think about because they’ve become so routine and normal.

For instance, one of these things is that the simple act of changing clothes can become an acrobatic dance. The last thing you want is to lift a top over your head and forget you’re wearing your specs. No doubt many pairs are flung across the room and broken this way every day.

Another everyday inconvenience is wearing headphones. If you’re already using a device to see, sticking wired buds into your ears is one accessory too many. Not only do you look like a cyborg, but unplugging and deframing without getting in a tangle becomes a whole hassle and skill in itself.

Morning disorientation

Waking up without your glasses leaves you with a feeling of disorientation. Sometimes this can involve blurry vision, potentially a headache, and the feeling of imbalance and confusion of not knowing where you are.

The point is if you’re used to wearing glasses throughout much of your day, when you wake up without them, it can be an unpleasant and strange start to your day. Not least because the next half hour can be spent fumbling around the house trying to remember where you left them while thinking, “if only I had my glasses I could see properly and find them.”

Replacing lost pairs

We’ve already touched on a few instances in which glasses can be broken or damaged. But if we’re going to list them, you would be here all day.

In every moment, somewhere around the world, a pair of glasses is being broken. They’re being sat on, stepped on, snapped by a three-year-old, scratched, smashed, eaten by a dog, broken in anger, or simply falling apart on their own.

Glasses are not the most robust things, especially as they have to be slender and light enough to sit on your face. This isn’t a problem until it is: which happens to be quite often. All this damage adds up over time to a lot of unnecessary trips to the opticians and money spent on replacing lost or broken frames.

Hygiene and safety

Although a pair of glasses tend to have a short lifespan, some can sit around gathering dust for a while.

Some people have pairs scattered all over, simply because they leave them lying around then forget where they are, or because they find it easier to have one for every area of the house or for every activity they do.

Whatever the reason, glasses can become part of the furniture that act as magnets for dust and grime. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if they stayed sitting on the shelf. But as they also spend a lot of time sitting on your face, and specifically, close to the eyes, it can lead to a whole range of hygiene health risks.

For instance, the rims of glasses can especially act as transporters for bacteria to get from a surface to a human host. It’s why glasses wearers often get spots and redness developing under the bottom rim on your cheek.

The mental burden

All the above is a lot to deal with, especially when you thought by wearing glasses you were only getting a device to improve your vision.

The mental burden of glasses is an intangible but very real side effect of their use. When you get used to wearing glasses, your perception of yourself and life can change rather dramatically, albeit in a subtle manner and over time.

After a few years or even just months wearing glasses, you may find yourself being less spontaneous, avoiding risky or daring activities, and generally being more cautious and apprehensive about trying new things.

In this way, glasses can act as an excuse to support not so helpful beliefs you may have already had. But more so, they influence how you see things—figuratively and literally—and so they can’t help but shape how you perceive and interact with the world.

Physical limitations

Glasses are effective for temporarily improving your vision for static activities. But when you bring any kind of movement into the mix, then they become nothing but a hindrance.

Sport is a great example of this. Try and do any sport while wearing your glasses, whether it’s table tennis, swimming, running on a treadmill, or martial arts, without sticking them to your face somehow, and you’ll quickly run into a few problems.

The fact is, glasses are fragile and delicate devices: they have to be in order to be light enough to use. Therefore, their design is not built for movement or any sort of physical activity.

Glasses are a great invention, but that doesn’t mean they’re great for your lifestyle. Find out how Laser Eye Surgery could help you by getting in touch with one of our friendly team of eye experts.