Vision plays a vital role in almost everyone’s daily activities, and I have been blessed with some pretty amazing eyes! I have been involved in shooting sports for about 6 years, I am an avid reader of novels, and I have been a computer geek since the family purchased our very first family computer back in the 90’s. My eyes have been put through some pretty extreme strain and yet I still manage to have great vision. I wish that I could still say PERFECT vision, but as time has passed some deterioration was inevitable. Not so much has changed to warrant getting prescription lenses or contacts yet, but randomly I do find that a thing is a little bit blurrier than it should be. Blinking a few times usually clears this up, so I am not fretting too much about my random blur. This year I am going to make it a point to get an eye exam as I have not done so since 2003.
While in college, I spent a lot of time on my laptop and in classrooms with computers, because I was a computer science major since day one. I toggled back and forth between computer science and computer information systems, but never leaving the realm of “I stare at a computer monitor all day”! As a senior in college I started working for a website design company and the college IIT help desk. I was looking at monitors all the time! When I graduated, I went full-time with the web design company and it was then that I finally realized that my vision needed some help! Looking at code for hours at a time was causing pain in my eyes! I mean, they just couldn’t take it after long exposure! I don’t like to take breaks, so the only time I really wasn’t looking at the monitor was when I went to the bathroom. I like to work at a steady pace until the job is complete. Back then, I really didn’t enjoy the work I was doing, so I eventually left the field… took a few months off and forgot all about the eye fatigue.
Now I am back to work in a help desk, and a typical day consists of looking at my dual monitors for 6 hours straight. Some down time here and there, but in general my eyes are locked on the monitors. Just like before, I started to feel pain in my eyes which led to headaches. At first I brought eye drops to work and took pain killers for the headaches. It was around Christmas this year that Justin and I got a catalog in the mail from ThinkGeek.com and inside I found these “computer glasses”. I was intrigued, but initially thought, “Ok, this sounds like a hoax to me”. I went to the ThinkGeek website and read everything that they had to offer about the glasses. Then I went to the source, the glasses are made by a company called Gunnar, a company that I had never heard of before ThinkGeek’s advertisement. I poked around their site to learn more in depth detail about the product.
Basically what I was able to find out in a nut shell is that their lens technology works to relieve eye fatigue or computer vision syndrome by filtering out blue light. The technology is more complex than that and in fact does more, but I’m afraid the jargon goes over my head and all I really care about is the end result. Will my eyes feel better after wearing these glasses? The company has been around as a corporation since 2008, so I figure if they are a dud, then surely they would be blown by now. Also, if I bought them and was not happy with the product, then they are returnable.
Another measure I took to ensure that these glasses were legitimate was to read review blogs, similar to this one. Testimonials on a site don’t usually post anything negative about the product, so you have to dig a little deeper to find these on your own. The reviews that I read were primarily shedding positive light for the product; except for one thing that I noticed about almost every one of them. The person that did the review was reviewing the product strictly for their blog. I don’t remember reading a single one that stated that they needed the product because they in fact experienced eye fatigue. They all said that the glasses were light weight and comfortable, and that there was a slight difference in their vision after using the glasses. But if they don’t feel the unbearable pain that I feel from working on a computer for so long, then how do they know if they work for someone like me? The answer is I just have to try them for myself!
I found several styles that I liked on the Gunnar website and luckily for me, they were all the same price of $79. There was a pair of aviators that I really wanted, but they were not exactly practical for the office… and they were $99.
As a very helpful buying guide, the Gunnar website gives the exact dimensions for each pair of glasses in millimeters. I was then able to measure my favorite Oakley sunglasses with a simple hardware measuring tape to get the dimensions that would fit me the best. Based on those dimensions I could see that the SheaDog Gunnars would be perfect. And lucky me, they were available in red (Fire) frames! Exactly what I wanted! If I was going to wear bright yellow lenses, like I am at a shooting range at work, I was going to at least have my favorite color frames included!
I ordered my glasses from Gunnar with standard shipping and it took about a business week to travel all the way from California. My first day of having these glasses at work was a grueling 8.5 hours straight! I figured that it would be best to break them in hard! On the Gunnar website, they generally state that these glasses are recommended for anyone that stares at a monitor for more than three hours at a time. After the three hour mark, I really started to pay attention to how my eyes were feeling. At the six hour point, I was becoming a believer that these glasses really do work! By the time the day was over, I felt no pain what so ever. No headache. No eye fatigue. I was astonished!
When you first put them on, there is some adjusting that is needed, and I would say that it shouldn’t last for more than 10 minutes. If you are use to wearing glasses, then the adjustment time should be even less. Mostly, I feel like I had to get use to having something on my face all the time, and not try to look over or under the lenses. The glasses are very light weight, but at the same time I felt pressure on my nose that I wasn’t use to. In the end, I actually bent the nose pieces out away from me and found that it was more comfortable. I also, bent the arms of the glasses so that they would wrap around my head more and not just shoot straight back from my temples. I think that this helped hold them on my face more naturally. After these two modifications were done and I adjusted to looking at a world that is “piss yellow”, I really started to love my glasses. They always did the job of helping my eyes and now that the adjusting period is over, I often don’t even realize that I have them on. The world is kind of pretty in “piss yellow”. Only time will tell if they are successful in saving my vision from expedited damage, but I think some action to deter such damage is better than nothing at all.
These glasses are fantastic! Since January 23, 2010, I have been working eye strain free!