How to Avoid Steamed-up Glasses

You’re riding your motorbike when suddenly your glasses start to fog. You’re cooking dinner when suddenly your glasses start to fog. You’re stepping out of your car, skiing in France, walking down the freezer aisle at Sainsbury’s, when suddenly, you guessed it, your glasses start to fog.

Just like picking up the occasional scratch and losing the odd pair, foggy lenses seems an unavoidable part of being a glasses wearer. And other than avoiding all these activities altogether, the best you can typically do is to learn when it’s going to happen and try and minimise how disruptive it’s going to be.

At least that’s what it used to be like. With a slew of new products on the market, today, suffering through the frustration of troublesome lens fogging is a thing of the past.

Anti-fog lens treatments work by creating a ‘hydrophilic’ coating on the surface of the lenses. By doing this, they reduce the amount of surface tension and allow water droplets (condensation) to instantly disperse as a thin sheet of water that’s virtually invisible to the wearer.

Such anti-fog products are already extremely popular with everyone from the military and professional sportspeople to hobby paintballers and motorcyclists. But the difference is now there’s no end of choice available for the average Joe on the street.

As non-glasses wearers, we can’t attest to the effectiveness of anti-fog treatments, but we can give you a rundown of what they are and what they’re supposed to do.

Clear It Away With Anti-fog Spray

Just like the products you may have seen for windows and mirrors, anti-fog spray is now available for your face furniture too.

In some cases, like glasses that have an anti-reflective coating baked into the lens during manufacturing, the spray needs to be applied once every week to stay effective. In other cases, you use the spray as and when you need it — keeping a travel size bottle on hand wherever you go.

Then there are topical lens treatments that can last weeks and even months with one application. The anti-static chemicals in these treatments will rub off quite quickly if you have a strong glasses-polishing habit, but it’s safe to say they offer much longer protection than the standard weekly sprays.

One thing you should make sure to look out for with your anti-fog product of choice is whether or not it’s suitable for all lens types. Some wipes, for instance, are not recommended for mirror coated lenses or those that have an anti-reflective coating.

The Ultimate Anti-fog Solution

There’s your sprays, creams, and wipes, and then there’s another solution to foggy lenses that is more effective than all the others combined, and doesn’t even require you to carry a bottle everywhere you go or constantly keep reapplying a funny liquid to your specs.

Even better, it also does away with the lenses that cause the problem in the first place. By now you’ve probably guessed we’re talking about one of the two alternative vision correction methods to glasses: contact lenses or Laser Eye Surgery. But as contacts come with their own fair share of problems – we could only be talking about the latter.

The fact is, the daily inconveniences and annoyances of contacts, like fogged up glasses, is one of the leading reasons people decide to have Laser Eye Surgery. It’s quite often when wearers become fed up after losing another lens, contracting an infection, or waking up with dry, irritated eyes again, that they finally start to seriously consider Laser Eye Surgery as an option.

Before arriving at this moment, for many people, Laser Eye Surgery was believed to be too expensive, too risky, and too much hassle. But with five minutes of research they see this was all a misconception, and that, as well as being more economical in the long run than glasses or contacts, it is actually safer and as easy to receive as an eye test.

Find out if you’re eligible for Laser Eye Surgery (I bet you are) by having a chat with one of our friendly clinic coordinators today.