Yes, it did happen to me once. Fortunately, I was driving at relatively low speed in the righthand lane and was able to come to a stop, put on the flashers, and dig around for the bits and pieces, and jury-rig them together until I could get home and get my spares.
If I’d been on the freeway I might have been thoroughly screwed.
Since then I perform regular inspections of the specs.
I have also had a pair of fitover sunglasses spontaneously self-disassemble, but I don’t pay nearly as much for those, I tend to be hard on them, and their abrupt loss was annoying but was not going to result in catastrophe.
Huh? I have had VSP for many years, both the regular plan and the more expensive plan, and VSP has never made my lenses. My optical shop makes them.
And they’ve saved me a lot of money. I could also get Zenni glasses covered by them if I submitted it myself, but I use the coverage to get new glasses or just new lenses from my local shop, because the lenses I get from that shop are higher quality than the Zenni lenses, and I get very high quality frames there when I order them. I use Zenni for cheap reading glasses, backup progressives, and sunglasses.
Perhaps I’ve been misled. My local optometrist/optician told me that VSP required that lenses be made in their lab. If that’s not true, well, perhaps they were not being truthful with me.
As to saving money, well, VSP has saved me some money. But not a huge amount.
VSP has always been helpful in saving me some money, but I’m lucky that my employer started letting us pay a bit per month to upgrade to the higher level plan. So I now have extra coverage for high end progressive lenses and coatings, and a bigger frame allowance.
Since im on a state/federal medical plan I dont get to pick who does my glasses but last time I got glasses i expected to get the cheaply made entirley of plastic “medi-cal” specials that i always had…It was amazing when the guy who would be making my glasses and frames said ok the glasses are 795$ the lenses were 495 so i had 300 to use for a frame … I was shocked and spent 2 hours looking over designer frames like a teenager looking for a prom dress …the ones i picked out was 312 but the shop covered the 12 over
They lasted 3 years until i flung them at someone i was in an altercation … (it was that or a rock …)
I have bought progressives online, and the only measurement I had to do on my own was the pupillary distance (which isn’t typically included on prescriptions). It wasn’t terribly difficult to do, though, and I was very pleased with the glasses I received.
I mention this because our resident optician Doug_K (who stopped posting shortly after the transition to Discourse) emphatically claimed that it was impossible to measure yourself for progressives at home. But Doug also said that Zenni glasses were garbage and $400 was a reasonable price for progressives, so consider the source.
Maybe I’ve been lucky, but given the success of online optical vendors, a lot of other people have been lucky too.
My optician gave me my pupillary measures at the same time I got the prescription. When I got my Zenni glasses, they came with pupillary measurement tool and I cannot for the life of me see how you can accurately measure your own pupillary distance, because you have to be absolutely dead on with the alignment. These measurements are precise to within a millimeter and if you turn a little to one side it can be quite off.
Every time an optician has measured my PD, they did it by holding a ruler up to my face. I’ll grant that they had more experience with the process than I ever will, but it isn’t as if they used some kind of high-precision device that is unavailable to me.
I measured my PD in 2009 when I placed my first online order for progressives. I’ve used that number ever since without any problems. But, as I mentioned earlier, it’s possible that I got it right via dumb luck. If someone doesn’t feel comfortable doing this at home, then they should certainly have a professional do it—but I didn’t, and I’m not worried.
Luxxotica bought most companies and they administer vision plans used only at their stores. My eyeglasses cost is probably as much as an iphone, I spose but my cell phone is less than $400. I don’t mess with the pre-pay discount vision insurance and instead buy frames every five years from cottage-type opticians that sell frames that aren’t made in China (just don’t trust the material on my face, basically).
Facing a mirror, hold a ruler up in front of your face. Close your right eye, and looking with just your left eye line up the 0 with your left pupil. Then close your left eye, and with your right eye look at where the ruler lines up with your right pupil.
This part sounds simple but is the important part. If the ruler is not precisely parallel to the line across the front of your eyeballs, and if those two lines are not also precisely parallel to the mirror, the measurement is going to be off.
The ruler does need to be precisely square to your face, but you don’t need to be perfectly square to the mirror. The offset you would create by having your face at an angle to the mirror would be exactly the same for each eye (offset=distance between eye and ruler divided by the cotangent of the angle you’re off from being perfectly square, if I’ve done my trigonometry correctly) and so cancel each other out. Assuming that you haven’t turned your head enough that you can’t get your eye pointed straight at the mirror, at least.
Edit: Wait, that might be completely wrong, because the centre of rotation of your eye is not at the pupil, obviously. This is more geometrically complicated than I initially thought.
Edit 2: I’m pretty sure the offset remains exactly the same on the assumption that when you rotate your eyeball to line up the ruler with your pupil, the linear distance your pupil moves on each eye is the same The angle for each is definitely the same, unless you’re using a convex or concave mirror. Don’t do that. But with a flat mirror, you’re still making identical triangles between the centre of rotation of your eye, the point at which the ruler appears to line up with your pupil, and the point along the ruler which is directly in front of your pupil when looking straight ahead. If the ruler is square to your face, that side of the triangle has the same length, and if the mirror is flat the angles are all the same.
I have a little ruler just for this purpose that I got with my Zenni glasses and I can’t get the same measurement twice. In the optician’s office they used a machine.
