In a time where 64% of Americans have some sort of prescription, eyeglasses are only becoming a larger and more important industry every year. For those that wear glasses over contacts, there are more options now than ever.
This is important to know when the average consumer spends $173 on their glasses every 1-3 years. It’s incredibly common for scratches, breaks, general wear, or poor vision to cause a need for a new pair. Nowadays a new pair can mean a lot of things though.
Replacement lenses, for example, allow the consumer to keep their frames or use older vintage ones while still using an updated prescription. These are cheaper and arrive more quickly than the average new pair of prescription frames. On top of this, there’s many variations on the modern pair of glasses that have arisen.
Many of these variations are for those with stronger prescriptions that affect sight at all distances. Bifocals and trifocals support seeing at two or three different distances for example. Progressive lenses, on the other hand, combine all the distances with a less harsh cutoff. Finally high-index lenses are thicker high prescription lenses.
On top of all of these different specific lenses, there are lens coatings that are becoming more and more common. These give scratch, sun, fogging, and various other protections that the lenses themselves cannot provide. These are just some of the ways in which the eyeglass industry continues to evolve year after year.
Source: LensFactory