Often simply called AR coating, this product is one of the most useful coatings you can add to a pair of prescription glasses. It is applied to the front and back sides of the lenses in several layers.
What Does Non-Glare Coating Do?
A non-glare coating reduces glare and reflections that can occur with untreated plastic or glass lenses. It also makes your lenses appear invisible, so people looking at your can see your eyes clearly.
Non-glare coatings can reduce eye strain and sharpen your vision, offering you less visual distraction.
Common Sources of Glare
Glare and annoying reflections are most common indoors during the day, and outdoors at night.
Everyone knows how light from a window makes a television screen harder to see. Prescription glasses lenses in contact with any light source cause the same effect—haloes and distracting ghost images wherever you look.
Overhead fluorescent lighting can cause square-shaped patches of light to appear on your lenses, blurring distant images.
Computer monitors create glare in order to produce an image, and cause eye fatigue. This fatigue can cause eye strain, headaches, and squinting. Non-Glare coating relieves this.
Driving at night is a playground of glare. Every light you pass bounces off the windshield, and if you wear glasses, the light bounces again off your lenses. Non-glare coatings allow for safer night driving, reducing or eliminating the reflections and haloes from oncoming headlights and streetlights.
More Benefits of Non-Glare Coating
All non-glare lenses incorporate ultra-violet protection for your eyes. Ultra-violet (UVA and UVB) rays can cause permanent damage and speed up the formation of cataracts. UV protection is a necessity for everyone’s eyes, and future vision.
Non-glare lenses also include a scratch-resistant coating, making glasses lenses more durable and easier to care for.
Can My Lenses Be Anti-Reflective?
Yes! Any prescription lens can have this coating applied. It must be done before the lenses have a single scratch or imperfection, so it must be done at the time the lenses are ground.
Non-glare can be applied to glass, plastic, polycarbonate, impact-resistant, hi-index and safety lenses. It will work with any frame selection and any prescription.
Non-glare coating can also be applied over a tinted lens, whether for comfort or a pair of prescription sunglasses.
Non-Glare coating is sold under many brand names, and also comes in different hues. Some lenses with the coating applied will appear pink and green, some blue and some gold. All the colors are equally effective.
Some common brand names are Zeiss and Crizal, and some coatings are even fog-resistant. Any optical retailer can make lenses with non-glare coating.