3. Gently rub the soapy water over the lenses. For some stubborn things (like sunscreen) in the edges I sometimes gently use a Q-tip.
4. Rinse under warm water. Gently rub with your fingers to agitate the soapy water and help rinse it off.
5. (This is the important step) Adjust the faucet’s flow to a low laminar flow and run the glasses through water, hitting the top of the glasses first and letting the water flow down and off the bottom of the lenses. It might take a couple passes but doing this will eliminate any water droplets on the lenses.
6. Use a clean towel to gently dry the frames. The lenses don’t need drying since the laminar flow eliminated all the water droplets on them.
- Wash with cold water. Warm or hot water might ruin the coating. (Our water comes supercooled right out of the tap in the winter,so in order to not have my hands instantly frozen into a solid block of ice I go for 15—20 degrees or so.)
- Use a drop of mild dish soap without ammonia.
- Dry them with a soft clean cloth (they use microfiber I think, I just use a random soft towel that doesn't give off any lint/dust)
Doesn't have to be more complicated than that. It takes 20 seconds and my glasses are as good as new.
My opticians have always given me a microfiber whenever I got a set of glasses made, and last time I went I asked for a spare as well. Now I have the habit of having one in my pocket at all times so I don't have to devolve back to using the bottom of my tshirt.
Wash with cold water. Warm or hot water might ruin the coating.
This is why I worry about radiant heat from fires while camping or burning yard debris. Plastic lenses are usually opaque to IR and that means they're heating up even more than you might think.
I asked my optician to please give me glass lenses and avoid the shenanigans with inferior materials, but they declined citing safety concerns with broken glass. Ah well.
> Our water comes supercooled right out of the tap in the winter
I'm from a place that never really gets below freezing, so I have to ask. Is this serious? If so, that's fascinating. When you turn the tap on, does the water instantly turn to slush on the way out? Does it come out at full speed or sluggishly?
I use a tall glass with tap water and some dish soap. Dunk them in while I shower, then remove, rinse off with cold water. Afterwards I could use a towel, but actually I tap them dry with a sheet of toilet paper. I THOUGHT that would leave small dust, but surprisingly, does not.
I use cheap, uncoated glasses though and replace them every 3-4 years anyways.
- Do not apply soap to the lenses. Soap is too thick. Apply it to your fingers and rub between fingers to dilute with a bit of water before applying to glasses.
- Use your fingertips as abrasive. Soap is there to dissolve any fats but your fingertips (if clean) are best material to remove anything from your glasses without scratching the surface.
- Few faucets give good laminar flow. I just blow over the glasses. If you do this right, your glass are not scratched and you have cleaned them well, all water will slide off easily.
- Don't ever use towels on either frames or glasses. Towels can easily scratch glass not to mention much softer frames.
I second this. Don’t use any kind of cloth. Just blow over your glasses a few times, droplets will disappear. Even finest cloth will leave scratches over time. Also it will reapply dirt and grease that naturally builds up as you use it
> Don't ever use towels on either frames or glasses.
Maybe because I get the non-scratch coating, but this has never been an issue for me. Have been doing it for twenty years without issue. Assuming lenses are replaced every several years, which they should be.
Agreed. This is the best way. Soap on fingers as you described above and laminar flow.
Other methods introduce too much unnecessary complication which don't make the lenses cleaner. Any kind of absorbent material has the potential of depositing tiny fibers or other specs on the lens surface. And air drying potentially leaves behind impurities the from water.
I basically do this, but carefully pat dry with either a kleenex tissue or a clean absorbent towel to get the few droplets that inevitably haven't slid off in the not-perfectly-laminar flow.
We have super hard water. Despite soaping to degrease the lenses, our water never just sheets off like soft or distilled water does on a really clean surface. It beads up and leaves deposits when droplets evaporate. So step 5 is problematic for me.
After the rinse, I set the glasses down on a paper towel - temple pieces extended as if I were going to put them on. The lens frames rest on the paper towel, their lower parts in contact with the towel.
I use canned air to gently drive droplets down front & back surfaces to the bottom of the lenses. They then generally wick away into the paper towel, or else evaporate at the lens/frame interface. No need for step 6. Takes about 30 sec, leaves no spots on the lenses after.
I clean my wife's glasses (it's unfair that she should get both bad eyes and all the extra work associated with it, so I do the parts of it I can).
This is the exact thing I do as well. I have also found that rinsing with hot water helps tiny droplets evaporate quickly without (for some reason? Clean water at home?) leaving drying stains.
My main concern is that the more effective soap may damage coatings. In practise, however, it seems that she has to change lenses often enough that damaged coating does not have time to become a big issue. (This is partially due to how pregnancy and breastfeeding changes the eyes -- we'll see how things go after this.)
Ultrasonic cleaners, with a bit of dishes soap in the water, are the most efficient/effective way (I uses to clean them with water and soap as well, in the past).
They are simple devices that lightly shake objects very quickly, in water. They work well with dirt that is soft (e.g. grease), and therefore not only for glasses, but also for teeth aligners and jewelry/small objects.
Some grease is still sticky, but generally speaking, I do a 10 minutes pass every day, and the eyeglasses have never been cleaner.
BE CAREFUL with coated lenses (in particular, cheap sunglasses there), as they will be destroyed (the coating/film will detach from the lens)!
> 5. (This is the important step) Adjust the faucet’s flow to a low laminar flow and run the glasses through water, hitting the top of the glasses first and letting the water flow down and off the bottom of the lenses. It might take a couple passes but doing this will eliminate any water droplets on the lenses.
This final step is also how soldiers get those perfect mirror finishes on their boots and belts!
I did it by using lots of polish, time, and a little (drops of) water. I don't remember holding my boots under a faucet, maybe I could have had an easier time if I'd have known back then. Some folks did use heat guns, but that always made the polish crack for me.
You can get water shedding coatings for lenses. Then you just have a few beads of water when you do this. You can either leave them there to dry or dab at them with a soft cloth like a tee-shirt.
Since I've started doing this I've actually had compliments from optometrists what good shape my lenses are in.
At the end of that sequence, I finish with a spray of deionized water (made using a resin filter specifically to make DI water), and a clean/dry microfiber wipe. DI water is an amazing all-around cleaner and leaves zero residue.
The best recommendation for it is remembering my chemistry teachers telling us that "water is the universal solvent". Well, filtering and removing all of the stuff previously dissolved in the water turns it into a very aggressive yet gentle solvent. It's great for cleaning surfaces and tools at the shop, windows at home, it makes glassware really shine, and of course, as a final step cleaning eyeglasses.
(I just use a kit & resin from CR Spotless, available online. No affiliation, hope it helps as a starting point)
I do something similar for the first 1-4 steps, only difference is I use cold water instead of warm or hot.
I don't know how true it is but I read in a few places where hot water and glasses don't mix well. It can mess with prescription lenses and potentially strip away extra coatings you have like auto-tint.
I know hot and warm are different but just to be safe I always go with cool.
It's too bad hot water is bad for lenses because it would be really convenient to be able to clean them while showering.
Avoid moisturizing soap in general when doing this, since they often have silicones, and that can leave a film. Dish soaps are less likely to have them, so it's a decent one to try blindly... or just read the label.
But yep, this is exactly what I do. Usually hand soap, but the stuff I get is just plain soap, no fragrance or moisturizer, so it rinses super easily. And when it's properly clean, the water leaves the surface dry and streak-free.
I just wanted to thank you for this advice. I just used your laminar flow idea and didn't even need to use my microfiber cloth at all, the lenses were totally clean!
Here's what I did:
1. First pass of laminar flow water from the faucet to remove any large debris.
2. Two sprays of lens cleaner on each side of each lens.
3. Rinse lenses with laminar flow water making sure to leave no droplets behind.
I do some optics design and prototyping for my day job. This is close enough to how I clean expensive optics, except that I would avoid a q tip unless absolutely necessary. The only thing I'd add is if you do need to dry something with a cloth, an old cotton undershirt that's been washed many times does a great job.
Also, I wash my windows at home with plain water and a squeegee.
This is what I do, usually once or twice a day. I seem to touch my face and glasses a lot, so dish soap is important as it removes the grease. Hand soap isn't as powerful and often has additives that will leave a film behind.
Between cleanings when I get a small smudge I go back to using my t-shirt, but I only clean the specific area that is dirty.
I do similar but use centrafugal forces to spin dry them almost dry with arm swings. Then I use toilet tissue dabbed to get the final few drops off (not wiped!). Toilet tissue can be scratchy so you might want an alternative but for me it's not doing much work and it's always at hand.
This is the best way. I do it as a general "reset", to really clean things and start fresh.
In between these sessions, I will use the little wipes. I find that paper they are made of is very similar to chem wipes. I keep the papers in a little box and use them for all sorts of minor tasks.
This is almost exactly what I do. After a lot of trial and error I found it works for me. The only thing I would add is to never use paper products to dry your Rx glasses or sunglasses if they have plastic lenses; the fibers in the paper will scratch the lenses.
This works for me. Dish soap is barely a drop that I use to spread. Also clean the frames occasionally with water. For 6, I use a fresh clean underwear instead of a clean towel. One less towel and the usual laundry cycle takes care of the rest.
I learned the dish soap method when I ... accidentally dropped them in dish water.
It is AWESOME.
It is amazing for sunglasses. Clarity is critical for driving, but they also seem to build up oil faster than normal glasses. Dawn makes them meticulously clean.
If you leave your sunglasses in the open in the car, it might be collecting the offgassing from the plastic - that same haze that accumulates on the inside of your windshield. I keep mine in a closed container and it seems to do just fine.
I don't use a towel to dry them, as any grit at all will fog the lenses. Instead, I just bang the edge of the glasses against my abdomen to knock the drops off.
They'll eventually fog, but it takes a lot longer.
I do something similar, but I tend to be less particular with using laminar flow, as ensuring that works reliably is difficult. I find I can simply blow on the lenses to drive any remaining droplets off of them.
I do almost the same thing, but I turn it to scalding hot once I’m done using my fingers so the lenses get hot so they dry faster. So far that hasn’t seemed to damage anything.
I do the same. The problem is at step 5: some faucets (at hotels and so on) are automatic (no touch, due to pandemic maybe). I don't have a solution for this yet.
The easiest solution I've found is to use a Zeiss lens wipe; at this stage the lens is already clean so you don't have to worry about pushing dirt around on the lens, and the alcohol on the wipe evaporates quickly and cleanly.
A better solution is to keep a clean microfiber lens cloth that never comes into contact with anything except freshly cleaned lenses to dry them. Unfortunately, for me it's tough to keep one that clean for very long.
A worse solution is just to use the relatively-clean inside of a t-shirt. All three methods have their place IMHO.
yep. no more microfiber whatever and no “lens cleaner”. i discovered this a long time ago and i think it’s hilarious that others use such care to clean theirs.
I'm one of those people but I also keep a similarly crude technique - simple microfiber that I replace regularly
The article mentions washing them, I have never tried this or nothing to back it up, but I suspect that may be where the problem lies. Just replace the cloth. They cost pennies.
They even go as far as to put them back in bags and such. I don't bother and have never noticed an excess of grease, dust, or anything they do. Mine is just replaced every now and then sitting openly on my desk
It's at the point where I wonder if doing less is more. It certainly seems obsessive
People may say microscratches, yada yada. It's so inconsequential that my eyes go bad before the lenses do due to my treatment.
I quite literally just got my first pair of glasses (bi-focals, no less!) yesterday, at the age of 41.
This whole article and thread has been super helpful, but I have to say thanks so much for the Zenni tip!
I was on that site all of 5 minutes before rushing to make an account.
The pages are super easy to read and informative, they tell me instantly whether the frames can go with bifocals and whatnot.
It even helped search by face type and let me do a virtual try-on.
In person places here all seemed hell-bent on upselling me, seemed to be bothered by my questions, and the prices were outrageous!
So now I can buy several cheap pairs, see which I like and then buy several copies to have stored for when I inevitably break my first pair.
I almost never say this these days but holy shit was I impressed all around!
Reading what people do for clean glasses (and as a person with OCD who sometimes gets infuriatingly distracted by the little shapes on my eyeball, much less dirty/scratched lenses), I was already not looking forward to needing these things.
I've worn glasses most of my life. Back in my 20s, after I got my first good job, I paid for the $500-super-duper-fancy glasses. And, I can say they were higher quality than the $30 Zenni pair but not better enough to justify a >1000% markup. As someone else said further down, Zenni glasses have more chromatic abrasion; I've noticed this too. However, constantly babysitting glasses and worrying about scratching/breaking them is not worth the effort for slightly improved image quality at the far sides.
With that being said, I do pay for quality sunglasses. In my experience, Zenni sunglasses are lacking.
Just seeing “I clean my glasses” (before the title was corrected), I thought: gee it’s about time I place that Zenni order to replace my favorite pair that broke a few months back. Went ahead and ordered two just to have a backup, for all of $30.
Granted I do clean my glasses (soap and water after each shower while they’re steamed up, gently towel dry). And I’m not much for disposable goods, these will last me years. But in the same spirit, I also like that Zenni accepts my expired prescription. My vision hasn’t changed enough to warrant another trip to the optometrist, so why waste the money, or my time, or theirs?
I think it comes across as OCD because the author is logging everything they do. But the gist is basically “buy a 10 pack of cloths and wipe your glasses.”
That’s what I do. And I shake the cloth beforehand to get sand from my pocket off of it. I do exactly four shakes, plus one extra swoosh that technically can’t be categorized as a shake due to its fluidity rating of 95 on the Holloway Motion Scale.
So here's the thing- I do exactly the same thing. Buy cheap classes. Use a kitchen paper towel or whatever is handy to clean them. But I have never had to replace a pair because of damage.
Every few years, my prescription changes enough to warrant replacement, and then I go and order another set of glasses from Zenni, and they always last until the next time, no matter how badly I treat them.
Be careful with using ultrasonic cleaners or using otherwise strong solutions because of the risk of taking off polarized/anti-glare lens coating, if you happened to have gotten it (you probably should have :)). Working in a lab that had ultrasonic cleaners, I used to do this and it happened with me after a few washes.
It is indeed a bit of a pain to clean it (I'm lazy and just don't... unless it gets really, really bad). This is why I'm strongly considering LASIK, don't have to pay for glasses for years ahead, don't have to deal with inconvenience of having it all the time (and especially when traveling and when doing physical exercise), don't have to deal with glare at night-time driving. I'm nearsighted and have astigmatism so I have to think carefully about this. Happy to hear if folks have their experiences to share on getting LASIK!
I'm in the same boat as you, in fact I've got several eye consults lined up for next week.
I just wanted to say, LASIK is a catch-all term now-days. I would recommend to see if you're eligible for the ReLEX SMILE[0] proceedure. That's what I'm hoping for. There are some (disturbing) videos on youtube that show the process step-by-step[1].
The biggest fear for me for traditional LASIK has always been the flap. SMILE is flapless.
This is interesting! I recently read that new tech has also allowed PRK to become better and thus more popular again - I compared it to LASIK a while ago and would probably have leaned more towards PRK from what I read.
This looks like the best of both worlds, great idea.
I have had anti-glare lens coating but it always wears off because I clean my glasses with whatever softish fabric comes to hand. I'm not getting again because the last pair I had eroded in edgewise fashion so lenses look like the coastline of some unvisited continent, which is far more distracting than any glare in the worn-away areas.
I wish I could do this - I've asked my opticians if I can have lenses without the coating, but they've said that the lenses automatically come coated and there's nothing they can do. Which seems pretty strange given that the lenses are made to order, now that I think about it. Maybe it's something about the way they order the lenses in, where there's simply no spot to ask for no coating, and they don't want to / aren't allowed to pick up the phone?
If I recall correctly, first I used to use di water, but later on I used a solution. Whatever protocol is used in biological labs to wash flasks and tubes, I pretty much followed that, I don't remember what washing solution I used, I recall it felt like soapy water. It's possible that latter might have been the problem.
Seriously it sounds exhausting. Wash them with mildly warm water and soap, dry them with a microfiber cloth, boom done.
The worst part of having some elaborate routine with an ultrasonic cleaner and all is that the moment after, your glasses will instantly start accumulating dust and probably get smudged. It's not going to be really clean for more than a few minutes. And that's fine, you probably shouldn't worry about it.
Personally I've had okay luck with the pre moistened lens wipes. You can clean your glasses then proceed to clean whatever screens in your car, phone, laptop, or other surfaces are close by. There's always something dirty within arms reach. No need to worry about destroying the coating.
Any reason you can’t use pure methanol to clean glasses? I don’t wear glasses so I don’t know the specifics, but that’s what we use to clean industrial laser lenses and any tiny speck or smudge or oil would immediately burn the protective coating. We also don’t touch the lens tissue when we clean it, rather we put methanol on the lens tissue and slide it across. Curved lenses are a bit more interesting but same method of cleaning.
Pure methanol is a little annoying to source. It seems like you can only buy it from lab supply shops -- not impossible to get but not exactly at the local Walgreens.
All of this feels a little overkill for eyeglasses. Dish soap works very well (it's concentrated so don't use too much or you'll be rinsing a while) and most people have it in their kitchen. I personally mostly use hand soap in the bathroom -- works less well if it's a soap with lotion but most places don't have that. The added benefit is that you can do it almost any time or place without thinking too hard.
+1 I just use warm water and hand soap, followed by rinsing and then a gentle wipe with a soft microfiber towel (the kind you'd buy for washing a car actually).
I use isopropanol to clean mine, works great. I just use toilet paper for the cloth, but combined with the isopropanol you don't need to apply any pressure, so scratching doesn't seem to be an issue.
Ought to generally be fine. That level of critical cleaning is kinda different from what glasses generally require.
Mine wind up with grease, fingerprints, dust, cooking oil, etc., so a good surfactant (i.e. dish soap) and some clean water tend to work pretty darn well.
If you want to finish 'em off with a critical-cleaning approach, go for it. The scratch/AR coatings on most glasses should be fine for both methanol and isopropanol. I would not, however, use solvents like acetone on plastic lenses of any kind; it'll probably destroy some of them.
RE: “overkill” - I agree, but this blog post/article prompted me to suggest this as a one step solution to eliminate multiple steps with multiple products as an alternative to what another commenter called “OCD.” A bottle of methanol, and tissue lens. Yes, you can’t find it everywhere, but you can buy it in bulk from a local lab supply store. If you’re cleaning constantly, keep it in a small dark glass bottle dropper that you can take with you.
Methanol works fine, it's great for removing the various things that soap and water won't remove (grease/oil). And yes, ideally wipe once in a single direction. Glasses are just another form of optics.
I have used a variety of wipes to clean and/or dry my lenses over the years. This always left microscratches and damage to the AR coating over time.
Since I switched to the hand method, my lenses are in much better shape:
1) Clean hands with basic bar soap, leave soap suds on hands
2) Lightly rub lenses and frames with soapy fingers, taking care not to apply too much pressure and deposit skin oils
3) Rinse off with hot water
4) Shake glasses dry with both hands (carefully)
5) If tiny water spots bother you, or you can't wait for the remaining droplets to naturally dry, use a lint free glasses wipe to dab (not wipe) them dry
Depending on what your lenses are made of, and if you have fragile coatings on them, and if you live around or work with fine abrasives, this works fine.
My lenses have oleophobic coating. I find breathing on them and rubbing with microfiber cloth to be quite effective even when they are coated with grease.
Readit News
1. Get your glasses wet with warm water.
2. Apply dish soap to both lenses.
3. Gently rub the soapy water over the lenses. For some stubborn things (like sunscreen) in the edges I sometimes gently use a Q-tip.
4. Rinse under warm water. Gently rub with your fingers to agitate the soapy water and help rinse it off.
5. (This is the important step) Adjust the faucet’s flow to a low laminar flow and run the glasses through water, hitting the top of the glasses first and letting the water flow down and off the bottom of the lenses. It might take a couple passes but doing this will eliminate any water droplets on the lenses.
6. Use a clean towel to gently dry the frames. The lenses don’t need drying since the laminar flow eliminated all the water droplets on them.
- Wash with cold water. Warm or hot water might ruin the coating. (Our water comes supercooled right out of the tap in the winter,so in order to not have my hands instantly frozen into a solid block of ice I go for 15—20 degrees or so.)
- Use a drop of mild dish soap without ammonia.
- Dry them with a soft clean cloth (they use microfiber I think, I just use a random soft towel that doesn't give off any lint/dust)
Doesn't have to be more complicated than that. It takes 20 seconds and my glasses are as good as new.
This is why I worry about radiant heat from fires while camping or burning yard debris. Plastic lenses are usually opaque to IR and that means they're heating up even more than you might think.
I'm from a place that never really gets below freezing, so I have to ask. Is this serious? If so, that's fascinating. When you turn the tap on, does the water instantly turn to slush on the way out? Does it come out at full speed or sluggishly?
I use cheap, uncoated glasses though and replace them every 3-4 years anyways.
- Do not apply soap to the lenses. Soap is too thick. Apply it to your fingers and rub between fingers to dilute with a bit of water before applying to glasses.
- Use your fingertips as abrasive. Soap is there to dissolve any fats but your fingertips (if clean) are best material to remove anything from your glasses without scratching the surface.
- Few faucets give good laminar flow. I just blow over the glasses. If you do this right, your glass are not scratched and you have cleaned them well, all water will slide off easily.
- Don't ever use towels on either frames or glasses. Towels can easily scratch glass not to mention much softer frames.
Maybe because I get the non-scratch coating, but this has never been an issue for me. Have been doing it for twenty years without issue. Assuming lenses are replaced every several years, which they should be.
Other methods introduce too much unnecessary complication which don't make the lenses cleaner. Any kind of absorbent material has the potential of depositing tiny fibers or other specs on the lens surface. And air drying potentially leaves behind impurities the from water.
https://www.amazon.com/Zeiss-Pre-Moistened-Cleaning-Wipes-Co...
If they are especially dirty, I'll rinse them with clean water and maybe a bit of soap first.
We have super hard water. Despite soaping to degrease the lenses, our water never just sheets off like soft or distilled water does on a really clean surface. It beads up and leaves deposits when droplets evaporate. So step 5 is problematic for me.
After the rinse, I set the glasses down on a paper towel - temple pieces extended as if I were going to put them on. The lens frames rest on the paper towel, their lower parts in contact with the towel.
I use canned air to gently drive droplets down front & back surfaces to the bottom of the lenses. They then generally wick away into the paper towel, or else evaporate at the lens/frame interface. No need for step 6. Takes about 30 sec, leaves no spots on the lenses after.
This is the exact thing I do as well. I have also found that rinsing with hot water helps tiny droplets evaporate quickly without (for some reason? Clean water at home?) leaving drying stains.
My main concern is that the more effective soap may damage coatings. In practise, however, it seems that she has to change lenses often enough that damaged coating does not have time to become a big issue. (This is partially due to how pregnancy and breastfeeding changes the eyes -- we'll see how things go after this.)
They are simple devices that lightly shake objects very quickly, in water. They work well with dirt that is soft (e.g. grease), and therefore not only for glasses, but also for teeth aligners and jewelry/small objects.
Some grease is still sticky, but generally speaking, I do a 10 minutes pass every day, and the eyeglasses have never been cleaner.
BE CAREFUL with coated lenses (in particular, cheap sunglasses there), as they will be destroyed (the coating/film will detach from the lens)!
This final step is also how soldiers get those perfect mirror finishes on their boots and belts!
Since I've started doing this I've actually had compliments from optometrists what good shape my lenses are in.
The best recommendation for it is remembering my chemistry teachers telling us that "water is the universal solvent". Well, filtering and removing all of the stuff previously dissolved in the water turns it into a very aggressive yet gentle solvent. It's great for cleaning surfaces and tools at the shop, windows at home, it makes glassware really shine, and of course, as a final step cleaning eyeglasses.
(I just use a kit & resin from CR Spotless, available online. No affiliation, hope it helps as a starting point)
I don't know how true it is but I read in a few places where hot water and glasses don't mix well. It can mess with prescription lenses and potentially strip away extra coatings you have like auto-tint.
I know hot and warm are different but just to be safe I always go with cool.
It's too bad hot water is bad for lenses because it would be really convenient to be able to clean them while showering.
But yep, this is exactly what I do. Usually hand soap, but the stuff I get is just plain soap, no fragrance or moisturizer, so it rinses super easily. And when it's properly clean, the water leaves the surface dry and streak-free.
Here's what I did: 1. First pass of laminar flow water from the faucet to remove any large debris. 2. Two sprays of lens cleaner on each side of each lens. 3. Rinse lenses with laminar flow water making sure to leave no droplets behind.
Thank you for changing my algorithm forever.
Also, I wash my windows at home with plain water and a squeegee.
Between cleanings when I get a small smudge I go back to using my t-shirt, but I only clean the specific area that is dirty.
In between these sessions, I will use the little wipes. I find that paper they are made of is very similar to chem wipes. I keep the papers in a little box and use them for all sorts of minor tasks.
It is AWESOME.
It is amazing for sunglasses. Clarity is critical for driving, but they also seem to build up oil faster than normal glasses. Dawn makes them meticulously clean.
They'll eventually fog, but it takes a lot longer.
I am guessing this may damage the glasses with the dust but it is fast and effective.
A better solution is to keep a clean microfiber lens cloth that never comes into contact with anything except freshly cleaned lenses to dry them. Unfortunately, for me it's tough to keep one that clean for very long.
A worse solution is just to use the relatively-clean inside of a t-shirt. All three methods have their place IMHO.
I know someone that cleaned their hard contacts like this too.
It's better to do a final rinse with RO or distilled water.
Here's my solution:
Once you also add amenities like photochromic lenses, it quickly adds up.
Zenni makes their glasses to order; what do you mean?
The article mentions washing them, I have never tried this or nothing to back it up, but I suspect that may be where the problem lies. Just replace the cloth. They cost pennies.
They even go as far as to put them back in bags and such. I don't bother and have never noticed an excess of grease, dust, or anything they do. Mine is just replaced every now and then sitting openly on my desk
It's at the point where I wonder if doing less is more. It certainly seems obsessive
People may say microscratches, yada yada. It's so inconsequential that my eyes go bad before the lenses do due to my treatment.
This whole article and thread has been super helpful, but I have to say thanks so much for the Zenni tip!
I was on that site all of 5 minutes before rushing to make an account.
The pages are super easy to read and informative, they tell me instantly whether the frames can go with bifocals and whatnot.
It even helped search by face type and let me do a virtual try-on.
In person places here all seemed hell-bent on upselling me, seemed to be bothered by my questions, and the prices were outrageous!
So now I can buy several cheap pairs, see which I like and then buy several copies to have stored for when I inevitably break my first pair.
I almost never say this these days but holy shit was I impressed all around!
Reading what people do for clean glasses (and as a person with OCD who sometimes gets infuriatingly distracted by the little shapes on my eyeball, much less dirty/scratched lenses), I was already not looking forward to needing these things.
With that being said, I do pay for quality sunglasses. In my experience, Zenni sunglasses are lacking.
Granted I do clean my glasses (soap and water after each shower while they’re steamed up, gently towel dry). And I’m not much for disposable goods, these will last me years. But in the same spirit, I also like that Zenni accepts my expired prescription. My vision hasn’t changed enough to warrant another trip to the optometrist, so why waste the money, or my time, or theirs?
That’s what I do. And I shake the cloth beforehand to get sand from my pocket off of it. I do exactly four shakes, plus one extra swoosh that technically can’t be categorized as a shake due to its fluidity rating of 95 on the Holloway Motion Scale.
So here's the thing- I do exactly the same thing. Buy cheap classes. Use a kitchen paper towel or whatever is handy to clean them. But I have never had to replace a pair because of damage.
Every few years, my prescription changes enough to warrant replacement, and then I go and order another set of glasses from Zenni, and they always last until the next time, no matter how badly I treat them.
Lenses are not expensive. They're just pieces of plastic, just like the frame.
It is indeed a bit of a pain to clean it (I'm lazy and just don't... unless it gets really, really bad). This is why I'm strongly considering LASIK, don't have to pay for glasses for years ahead, don't have to deal with inconvenience of having it all the time (and especially when traveling and when doing physical exercise), don't have to deal with glare at night-time driving. I'm nearsighted and have astigmatism so I have to think carefully about this. Happy to hear if folks have their experiences to share on getting LASIK!
I just wanted to say, LASIK is a catch-all term now-days. I would recommend to see if you're eligible for the ReLEX SMILE[0] proceedure. That's what I'm hoping for. There are some (disturbing) videos on youtube that show the process step-by-step[1].
The biggest fear for me for traditional LASIK has always been the flap. SMILE is flapless.
[0] https://med.stanford.edu/eyelaser/procedures/ReLEXSMILE.html
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L41-CqynUHE
This looks like the best of both worlds, great idea.
Unless this is maybe parody and I failed to pick up on that?
The worst part of having some elaborate routine with an ultrasonic cleaner and all is that the moment after, your glasses will instantly start accumulating dust and probably get smudged. It's not going to be really clean for more than a few minutes. And that's fine, you probably shouldn't worry about it.
All of this feels a little overkill for eyeglasses. Dish soap works very well (it's concentrated so don't use too much or you'll be rinsing a while) and most people have it in their kitchen. I personally mostly use hand soap in the bathroom -- works less well if it's a soap with lotion but most places don't have that. The added benefit is that you can do it almost any time or place without thinking too hard.
It probably would be more than enough to clean the hair brushes, instead of the ultrasonic thing.
Mine wind up with grease, fingerprints, dust, cooking oil, etc., so a good surfactant (i.e. dish soap) and some clean water tend to work pretty darn well.
If you want to finish 'em off with a critical-cleaning approach, go for it. The scratch/AR coatings on most glasses should be fine for both methanol and isopropanol. I would not, however, use solvents like acetone on plastic lenses of any kind; it'll probably destroy some of them.
Since I switched to the hand method, my lenses are in much better shape:
1) Clean hands with basic bar soap, leave soap suds on hands 2) Lightly rub lenses and frames with soapy fingers, taking care not to apply too much pressure and deposit skin oils 3) Rinse off with hot water 4) Shake glasses dry with both hands (carefully) 5) If tiny water spots bother you, or you can't wait for the remaining droplets to naturally dry, use a lint free glasses wipe to dab (not wipe) them dry
I miss actual glass, uncoated lenses.