Until you’ve lived at least a year in corrective lenses, it’s hard to imagine the impact that wearing glasses will have on your life. Although getting your vision corrected is necessary and life-changing for the better, it also changes the way you approach certain activities.
Those long Sunday cycles hit differently when you’re attempting to stuff your corrective eyeglasses under a pair of protective, wind-resistant goggles. When you need to tackle a small home improvement project, wearing safety goggles over your glasses can be a hassle.
Pretty soon, you might come to resent your corrective lenses, even though you know you need them to see clearly (and you love the style they add to your look). However, goggles that fit over glasses aren’t the only option people who wear corrective lenses have in terms of protective eyewear.
Let’s discuss the need for protective glasses, the problems with goggles that fit over your regular eyeglasses, and better options that keep your eyes safe, your face comfortable, and your style on point.
Finally, we’ll go over the style and safety option that protects and serves (serves looks, anyway). That’s right; we’re talking about Stoggles.
Why Do You Need Goggles Over Glasses?
Whether or not you’ve had to use them yet, you will. Eventually, there will be a need for you to add a layer of protection to your eyes other than just your regular eyeglasses. Also, not to throw shade, but regular eyeglasses aren’t made to protect your eyes at all.
Work
Many professions require protective eyewear while on the job. This means while you’re hard at work, your eyes are at risk of injury. On-the-job eye injuries affect 2,000 U.S. workers a day. Most of these injuries happen to workers who either weren’t wearing safety glasses or who were wearing them improperly.
Jobs that require safety glasses can include:
- Healthcare positions for doctors, nurses, surgeons, assistants, and technicians. Even some office personnel at medical facilities choose to wear protective safety glasses.
- Construction workers, foremen, and supervisors
- Laboratory workers
- Plumbers
- Janitorial and custodial positions
- Landscapers
- Skincare professionals like estheticians and professional waxers
There are numerous other jobs that place your eyes at risk, and your employer should let you know if safety glasses should be worn on the job. If you think your eyes are at risk, the best practice is to wear protective glasses.
At Home
You probably didn’t grow up seeing your parents take particularly good care of their eyes. If they wore hearing protection and safety goggles while cutting the lawn, we’d definitely like to shake their hand.
Eye injuries happen at home, during routine activities like yard work, simple cleaning tasks, and larger home improvements projects that involve cutting and debris. Of the 2.5 million eye injuries sustained in the U.S. each year, 52% of them happen at home to people who weren’t wearing protective eyewear.
In case you think you’re safe because you don’t own a saw or a drill, you aren’t. Over half the eye injuries that happen at home happen in the yard or garden are completely unrelated to home repair or improvement.
No matter how routine or how many times you’ve performed a task, there is always a risk for an accident and subsequent injury.
At Play
The statistics of eye injuries that occur at home are unsettling, but of those injuries, one in four happens as a result of play and/or sports-related activities. We know what you’re thinking; there’s no way you’re wearing safety goggles while you’re playing beach volleyball with your friends or kids. We get it.
Beyond home sports and games, there are certainly other activities that beg for eye protection. Cyclists, for instance, often have trouble with the wind in their eyes when they ride, especially if their glasses don’t have side and top shield protection.
Snowboarders, motorcyclists, and even parents teaching their kids to catch a baseball are all prime candidates for eye-related injuries and irritation. Statistics show, it really is all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
The Over the Glasses Goggle Problem
If eye injuries are so common and threatening, it begs the question of why we aren’t doing more to protect ourselves. The easy answer is, we don’t want to be uncomfortable and look like dweebs while we’re participating in activities that make us feel really awesome, like cutting lumber or getting a better edge on our yard than the neighbor’s.
People who wear corrective lenses are even more apt to forgo safety goggles simply because they have to find a pair that will fit over their frames. This archaic system of eye protection is totally problematic.
Discomfort
Have you ever inadvertently put on two pairs of pants or tried to get dressed while you’re still soaking wet? Both actions will give you the same awkward, uncomfortable result that immediately registers “this is wrong” with your brain.
Wearing safety goggles over your prescription frames feels the same way. Even though attempts have been made to make over-the-frame goggles more comfortable, they still feel awkward, tight, and completely uncomfortable.
They Don’t Fit Properly
Even the most bougie goggles will collect dust on a shelf if they don’t fit properly. Ill-fitting goggles are another reason why many people simply choose to risk their eye health and forgo protective eyewear.
Unlike just being uncomfortable, ill-fitting goggles are probably the wrong size and shape for the wearer. If you pick up a pair of safety goggles at the hardware store, they’re usually one-size-fits-all. We aren’t sure who “all” is, but their heads aren’t the ones wearing those cheap glasses that slip and slide around and hang down past the bridge of the nose.
Vision Restriction
You have to wear your prescription lenses to see clearly, but the minute you pull a pair of goggles on over top of them, your vision worsens, leaving you feeling like you’re looking through a dirty window.
Although some safety goggles are made with quality material, the additional lens through which your eyes will process images can make it hard to focus on smaller detail. There’s also a possibility that the goggles will warp the landscape you see, making you feel like you’re in a funhouse, which probably won’t feel fun.
Foggy Lenses
Wearing prescription lenses means you’re already familiar with foggy lenses. Unless your glasses are treated with anti-fog coating, you get a nice, steamy reminder of it every time you leave your office or home.
Safety goggles add an additional layer of foggable, vision-restricting material between you and the outside world. Some safety goggles may have an anti-fog coating, but if your prescription glasses don’t have it, it will hardly matter.
Lack of Style
Let us be the ones to say it out loud: most safety goggles aren’t attractive. They’re 1000% necessary, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t stress that point. However, we’re also humans, and we like to look good just as much as the next person.
One of the biggest reasons people skip out on safety goggles is because they simply don’t like the way they look wearing them. People who wear corrective lenses are even more likely to bail on wearing goggles because being called “six eyes” is literally 50 percent worse than being called “four eyes.”
Safety goggles that fit over glasses are just a bad option. Normally, even when they’re used properly, they create more of a distraction to the wearer. This is compounded if they fog and need to be removed to be wiped down. There’s a better solution: Stoggles.
Alternatives to Goggles That Fit Over Glasses
We want you to protect your eyes, but we also want you to feel comfortable and cool while you do it. It’s entirely possible to have safety and style and in one pair of glasses.
Let’s look at what you actually need in terms of eye protection.
Side and Top Shields
When considering protective eyewear, ask yourself how much protection you realistically need. For example, some jobs and tasks require goggles that fit closely to your face to create an airtight seal. Other jobs and activities might need the level of protection offered by top and side shields.
A majority of the world probably only needs the protection of side and top shields. An airtight seal isn’t necessary all that often. An airtight seal is usually only required when dealing with hazardous or irritating liquids and gases.
So, how do side and top shields work exactly?
Top shields protect the vulnerable area of your eye where the top rim of your glasses sits nearest to your eyebrow. A top shield connects the top rim of your glasses to your brow bone (or slightly higher) to ensure debris and splatters can’t infiltrate.
Side shields work similarly by protecting the sides of your eyes, where your corrective frames leave you exposed. Side shields create a barrier that protects debris and liquids from reaching your eye at your temples.
ANSI Z87.1 Certification
If you’re going to wear safety glasses, make sure they meet ANSI standards. The American National Standards Institute does just what you probably think it does: facilitates standardized solutions. By following ANSI standards, safety glasses manufacturers produce consistent, protective eyewear that you can trust.
ANSI’s Z87.1 certification ensures safety glasses are impact-resistant and shatter-proof. They also ensure that your glasses are only made with high-quality and long-lasting materials. You can tell if your glasses have ANSI certification by checking the retailer’s website or looking for the “Z87” stamp on the lenses and frames.
Anti-Fog Lenses
Do yourself a favor and make a personal promise to never buy eyewear that isn’t treated with anti-fog coating. You’ll save yourself a lot of frustration and keep your eyes safer by ensuring you never have to take them off to wipe them down ever again.
Safety glasses should always be coated with anti-fog chemicals to make sure there’s never a need to remove them during an activity that requires them.
Prescription Availability
Here’s what separates a superior pair of safety glasses from anything you’ll find at the home improvement store. Prescription availability in a pair of safety glasses means you’ll never have to wear double glasses again.
- No more stuffing your corrective lenses under goggles.
- No more uncomfortable fittings.
- No double lenses.
A custom, prescription pair of safety glasses that are ANSI-certified and crafted with care is an investment that will transform the way you take care of your eyes.
There’s still more good news: you can get all these great safety glasses options in a pair of frames that are stylish, sleek, and sophisticated.
Get Stoggles
Stoggles are the glasses that protect like safety glasses, fit like a glove, and look like your favorite pair of frames. Our safety glasses were designed to give you the eye protection you need with a style you’ll love because we care about your vision and eye health.
Our safety glasses are ANSI Z87.1 certified, anti-fog, comfortable, outfitted with top and side shields, and available in numerous color and style combinations so you can get the look you love. What’s more, we fill all your prescription requests in-house to save you time, money, and a big hassle trying to get prescription safety glasses from a big box company.
You’ll also get a couple of sweet added benefits from our glasses:
- UV Protection. Both our SunStoggles and standard Stoggles have UV blocking lenses to filter out harmful UVA and UVB rays, keeping your eyes safe from ultraviolet radiation wherever you may be in contact with it.
- Blue Light Protection. We know life takes you from screen to screen more often than not, so we coat all our lenses with blue-light filtering material to keep your eyes protected while you’re answering emails, catching up on work, or online shopping.
Stoggles protect your eyes better than standard safety glasses because you’ll actually wear them.
One Pair of Glasses To Rule Them All
Goggles that fit over your corrective lenses just don’t work. They’re uncomfortable, ill-fitting, awkward, and voted “Most Likely to be Removed” by their wearers. If you wear prescription lenses, say no to double vision and grab a pair of prescription-strength Stoggles.
Keeping your eyes safe and retaining your comfort and style shouldn’t be an “either/or” scenario, and with Stoggles, it never has to be.
Sources:
When It Comes to Eye Injuries, the Men’s Eyes Have It | AAO.org
Eye Safety At-a-Glance Protecting Your Child's Vision in Sports|The Vision Council.org
American National Standards Institute | ANSI Home
