Working with prescription glasses I often hear lots of people’s questions about glasses and one of the most common questions I get is what are progressive prescription glasses.

When I was in elementary school, this is back in the mid 70’s, I remember the lady that sat in the front office of my school always wore 2 pairs of glasses around her neck, and whenever someone entered the office she would have to switch her glasses. As a child I thought it was silly to wear 2 pairs of glasses, but today I understand why she needed the 2 pairs of glasses. Her problem was that she needed glasses for reading and for seeing at a distance, and back in the 70’s bifocal glasses were both expensive and ugly.

Today the price of bifocals has come down drastically because of improvements in the process of how they are made which has brought the price of bifocals down making it much more affordable to be able to have one pair of glasses that will allow you to see both up close for reading or anything else within arm’s reach, and for seeing at a distance like driving and watching Television, instead of having to have 2 pair of glasses to do both. Having only one pair of glasses that you can wear from the time you get out of bed in the morning till you get back into bed at the end of the night makes it less likely that you will lose them.

The only thing that has not improved about bifocal glasses is the way they look. If you are not sure what bifocal glasses look like, they look like 2 pairs of glasses were cut in half and stuck together, and essentially that is exactly what they are. Today the methods of bonding the halves are better than in the past, but there is still a visible seam between the 2 halves that many users complain about.

The most common complaints are about the fact that there is no transition between the near and the far, and this sudden change has been known to cause headaches in people until they get used to the new bifocal glasses.

In the last few years we have seen the emergence of progressive lenses for prescription eyeglasses. Progressive means that the lenses change depending on what part of the glasses you are looking through. Typically when we are working on something that is within our reach we are looking through the bottom half of our glasses and when looking at a distance we use the top half.

Having one lens that can act as both reading and distance glasses without having that ugly line and having a gradual change instead of a sudden change in the prescription is making progressive eyeglasses a very popular choice with younger people who need these types of glasses while people who have been wearing the old style of  bifocals have been wearing them for so many years they have become used to the sudden change and have a hard time adjusting and usually decide to stick with bifocals in the end.

When you are choosing a new pair of prescription glasses try to keep in mind that not all frames can handle progressive lenses. If you are buying your prescription glasses online most sites will have a brief description about their different glasses and one of the facts should say whether or not the glasses are good for single vision lenses or progressive lenses.