Maryland Eye Associates
800 Prince Frederick Boulevard
Prince Frederick, MD 20678
Eyewear: Making the Right Choice
You may have noticed the significant shift in eyewear design that has over taken out of date styles that have been around for a long time. Like clothing, your glasses not only serve the obvious functional purpose, but they also impact how you look and come across to others. Dress for success is not a new concept. What you wear reflects who you are and your attention to detail.
When it comes to eyewear, selecting a great look takes time, money and professional help from opticians who really know what they are doing. We have all gone shopping, purchased clothes, only to come home with that deflated feeling of disappointment from making poor choices that just don’t work.
The wrong choice for your glasses is no different. Having someone say, “Wow, I love your glasses!” should be the outcome of your eyewear purchase. Aside from accurately filling your doctor’s prescription, opticians should guide you to that great look.
Your optician should select various frames for you after simply looking at your face and your prescription. You should not have to self select frames on your own. If you are told to look around and bring a handful of frames to the dispensing table, you are highly likely to make a disappointing purchase. You may also be in the wrong optical store. Opticians look at faces and glasses all day long. They know what works. There is an art to achieving a great look with glasses. Before you look in the mirror, the optician should see how various frames look on you.
The challenge for all of us is leaving the old look behind and moving onto the new. We all know someone who has had the same eyewear style for decades. This is not an exaggeration. Men are worse than women when it comes to this. Let the opticians select a current style that will make you look great and years younger. Nothing dates and ages one more than wearing a style from a generation or two ago.
You need to be open to change. Looking in the mirror and seeing a totally different frame style on your face requires thoughtful consideration, not immediate rejection because it is too different. This is not to say that you don’t play a role in the selection process. You and your optician work together to make the right choice.
The optician should explain why one frame “works” and another doesn’t. Faces come in all shapes and sizes. So do frames. The clothing analogy makes this point. Product parameters of size, shape, color, fit, comfort and most importantly, current styling, all matter.
A more technical consideration in the selection process is the question of will your prescription work in a particular frame. This is something you as the patient/consumer has no knowledge about. If you have a relatively low, single vision prescription, your frame options are nearly unlimited. High prescriptions or the more complex progressive prescriptions may limit what you can choose from. Concerns like these are the responsibility of the optician.
You can achieve success at various price levels. But eyewear is like jewelry. While you can look great at either end of the price spectrum, there is nothing like the real thing. Designer eyewear from a reputable optician is worth the investment. After all it’s on your face.
