Common Prescription Safety Glass Misconceptions

People have a lot of misconceptions about safety glasses in general and prescription safety glasses in particular. The problem is that these myths could give you the wrong idea about how to make sure you’re operating at your best while participating in whatever activity you need the safety for in the first place.

Safety Glasses Are Only Needed at a Job

According to EHS today, as much as half of all eye injuries actually happen at home. It’s surprising just how many projects you can do that are dangerous and really require eye protection. Here are a few examples:

• Woodchipper-If you’re using a woodchipper, eye protection is often recommended since those little bits could easily make their way into your eye and you really need safety glasses that both let you see with a prescription and those that have an impact rating if you’re doing this. It’s not a good idea to just immediately go out and grind down that stump without help.
• Weedwacker-When you’re using a weedwacker, you’re going to be firing all sorts of debris in all directions. This is why it’s a good idea to make sure you’re wearing protection while you’re doing it. It’s not just grass that will be kicked up, you could get little pebbles in the air as well.
• Other Projects-If you’re doing any kind of construction work such as using electric saws that kick up sawdust or anything of the kind, eye protection is going to be something you’re going to want to look into for sure.

The same study shows that more than three-quarters of the people getting eye injuries at home weren’t wearing proper protection. Forty percent of the injuries at-home occurred with regular activities and not anything special. This included home repairs, cooking, and other such activities.

You Can Just Wear Regular Glasses as Safety Glasses

When you read somewhere that you need safety glasses, whether it’s for a job, for a personal crafts or construction project, or for any other reason, it can be tempting to decide the regular prescription glasses will be enough. After all, they already cover your eyes, and they already have a prescription in them, so you don’t need to go to any additional trouble. Whatever wood chips, pebbles, or other projectiles or hazards there are that might occur due to your project will be repelled just as well by the glasses in front of your face as anything else.

Many regular prescription eyeglasses actually cover a relatively small area of the eye. Plus, even if you have prescription eyeglasses that have shields that extend around the eye, the point is that the glasses aren’t rated for protection. Something striking regular eyeglasses could cause them to shatter and potentially fire glass towards your eye. In particular, you will need high impact protection if you’re in a situation that requires safety glasses. The official standard for this is the Occupational Safety and Health high impact standard. Many handbooks talking just about this situation will use phrases like “permanent vision loss” to talk about what happens if you don’t get proper safety glasses with a prescription.

Safety Goggles Can Negatively Affect Your Vision

This just isn’t true. There’s no evidence to suggest that anything that you do using safety prescription glasses is going to negatively affect your vision. In fact, it could be just the opposite if you’re trying to go without either safety or prescription glasses because having no safety glasses will endanger your eyes because of impact risk, and having no prescription glasses can cause eye strain as you try to make sure you can see what you’re looking at and you keep squinting.

If safety glasses are causing you discomfort, this can often mean that they just don’t fit you properly. It can also mean you have the wrong prescription. In either case, it’s worth talking to a professional to help make sure that you’re covered properly in either eventuality.

It’s reasonable to be skeptical about whether safety glasses with an RX are the same in terms of vision as eyeglasses, but it turns out that this is generally the case.

Safety Glasses Keep Your Eyes Safe in All Situations

Generally, you’re going to want to make sure that you check the glasses you buy for exactly what sorts of protections they’re going to offer you. For the most part, something labeled as safety glasses is only going to protect you from impacts. You can’t just wear these when you’re working with chemicals because safety glasses aren’t going to completely cover every square inch of the area around your eyes. Otherwise, there could be room to get even the smallest drop in them.

In other words, they aren’t closed off completely, so some kind of chemical could splash into the glasses and then flow around them, hitting your head and dripping down into your eyes. In this case, you’re going to need full-scale goggles that can cover your eyes completely. Again, this is available, but it’s important to make sure that you match up the type of safety you need with the glasses that can provide that type of safety. You can’t just assume that safety glasses will keep you safe from anything because it has “safety” in the name.

Regular Safety Glasses Will Be Fine

When you’re doing precision work of any kind, trying to do it without having your proper prescription in place is an extraordinarily bad idea. You need to be able to see perfectly clearly, with the standard 20/20 vision, in order to complete your task, and it’s not worth sacrificing this degree of vision because it’s easier to get safety glasses without a prescription in them.

You definitely want to stay at your best and there’s no need to sacrifice proper vision correction for safety glasses. You can absolutely have both.

Safety Glasses Always Fit Over Regular Glasses

This is definitely not universally the case. There are many different kinds of safety glasses, and you’re going to want to pay attention to the particular safety eyewear unit you’re looking at to make sure that it will fit over your eyeglasses. Plus, many don’t, and many that do aren’t going to be rated up to the standard that you want. Plus, you’re often going to want to make sure safety glasses that fit over your other glasses aren’t going to fog up and make your experience even more difficult or dangerous.

In general, you’re often going to be much better off if you just go with safety glasses that have a prescription built into them rather than getting the kind that goes over. For one thing, you don’t want to risk your normal glasses because then you have to worry about how you’re going to drive home or do other everyday things. For another, even the safety glasses that fit may not fit snugly and this could be uncomfortable and less than ideal. Your glasses inside could become partially dislodged and then it will take you a minute to correct them which could be a problem depending on what you’re currently doing.

For more information about prescription glasses and other related topics, please don’t hesitate to go ahead and contact us today.