With winter’s chill behind us and the open road, beach, golf course, and hundreds of other outdoor activities calling our names, it’s time to discuss eye protection for those bright summer days.
When picking out a set of shades for your summer outdoor adventures, you can pick from an array of styles and lens options. We’ll leave the style selections up to you, but for lenses, there are some excellent reasons to consider polarized sunglasses this summer.
Polarized sunglasses feature a layer of specially applied chemicals that block polarized light from entering your eye. What is polarized light? It’s the light reflected off horizontal surfaces – you see it as a blinding glare on roads, water, and the hood of your car.
Unlike traditional lenses, which must be very dark-tinted to block glare effectively, even lightly-tinted polarized sunglasses can keep you from being blinded.
1. Polarized Sunglasses Increase Safety
When the sun’s glare enters your eye, it overloads the light-sensitive cells in your retina, and your vision washes out or even whites out, blinding you completely. While this is bad enough when you’re sitting on the beach looking out over the water, it’s downright dangerous when it happens while you’re out on the road. Thousands of traffic and boating accidents occur yearly because drivers are blinded by glare.
Polarized sunglasses eliminate glare without requiring the vision-impairing dark tints that traditional sunglasses rely on, making your road trip a safer experience.
2. Polarized Sunglasses Restore Color Vision and Contrast
When glare overloads the light-sensitive rods and cones in your eyes, you lose the ability to see colors, and the difference between light and dark objects is reduced. With polarized lenses, eliminating glare restores your vision to true color, bringing back the contrast between light and dark.
You’ve been looking forward all winter to getting back to your summertime hobbies. Why try to enjoy them in a less bright, colorful, and clear world?
3. Polarized Sunglasses Reduce Eye Strain and Fatigue
When you walk outside on a sunny day without sunglasses, you squint to reduce the light entering your eyes and protect yourself from eye damage. Unfortunately, this reflex also requires your eyes to work harder to remain focused on objects, reduces your depth of focus (the range of distance that you can see clearly), and forces the muscles around your eyes to tense up, all leading to eye strain and fatigue.
Over a long enough time, this fatigue and strain can cause more severe vision problems by weakening your eyes’ ability to adjust to changing focal points and light conditions. Polarized lenses significantly reduce the effort your eyes need to exert to stay comfortable in the summer sun.
When it’s time to prepare for the sun, visit Eyesight Associates.
Our Optical Shop has hundreds of stylish and effective options for your summer eye protection. Give us a call to learn more: 478-923-5872.