How much for glasses? £500?

[DustyLee123]

I don’t wear glasses, so no idea how much they cost, but DH came home last week and said that he’d spent over £500 on a new pair. It seems extortionate to me, or is it normal?

Mine cost about £600, of which £450 is the lenses. High prescription plus severe astigmatism plus varifocals.

I've just bought prescription varifocal Rayban sunglasses...£350

That will be for a simple prescription then.

Have you ever had an eye test @DustyLee123?

Depending on what he actually got for his/your money, £500 doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. My current pair were £170 for the frames and around £350 for the lenses. Very thin high spec varifocals with a Transitions coating. I could have saved a lot of money by opting for cheap frames and thick low spec varifocals with no coating.

My current pair were £700, that was with a hefty discount. The frames were only £140. I'm minus 12 in one eye and minus 8 something in the other. I needed varifocals and got ones that were more expensive but they function like normal glasses so I don't have to move my head up and down to see like I did when I tried Specsavers varifocals. They are also super thinned or else they are too thick to wear, and have the reaction lenses so I don't need separate sunglasses.

Those of us with complex prescriptions would love to be able to buy cheap glassed!

I paid around £130 for one pair in Specsavers.;)

You seem to have very little curiosity as to what your DH's vision issues actually are.

I think if they were just for reading/tv I wouldnt have paid that much to be honest

mine are perched on my nose all day every day, I have varifocals, anti scratch coating, reactions lenses, I think my last pair were £375 but I did get another pair ‘free’ - had to pay for the extras on the lenses

@southwest12
Could I please ask where you got your specs with the super thinned lenses ? My prescription is more severe than yours and I live in hope that one day I can get thinner lenses than I currently have. Thank you.

Did you miss this bit of dripfeed?

He does have an eye problem, goes to the hospital sometimes.

There is every need to spend a huge amount on glasses.
I personally spent over £500 on my last glasses and cant fucking use them. I'm still using an old pair. Because I have a complicated prescription. So have to have frames, cannot be frameless, even with a lense thinned, I still require quite thick frames. And then they have to be large enough so I can see, not peer. And large enough for the weight of the thinned lense, else they slip down on one side.
And, well, I look stupid. I'm not wanting to look stupid, so I'm limited to about 6 frames, none are cheap.

There is every need to spend a huge amount on glasses
I spend a lot on glasses because I wear them every single day of my life, on my actual face where everyone sees them. They create an impression with everyone you interact with, and they define your look and how people perceive you. So I spend a large sum on ensuring I’m seen as creative, individual, stylish, professional, etc. As a pp pointed out, people spend similar sums on designer handbags or shoes etc, and your glasses are a lot more visible.

Then you're incredibly lucky.

It might seem to be on the higher side, and it is, but it also isn't unusual or shocking.

Much depends on the prescription you have and the lenses you need. It isn't all in the cost of the frames though you can sometimes be restricted to certain types and sizes (of frame).

I do get the buy one get a second pair free from Specsavers, but because of the lenses I need for my main pair (bifocal, thinned, and reactions lenses so they are also prescription sunglasses) I can still spend over £300. I fully expect that when I need to get new ones in another couple of years it could be much more than that.

We are financially comfortable/ earn well.

i bought 3 pairs with lenses for £110 last month.

Unless the money was on the lenses I’d be livid if DH spent that much

I have a voucher for specs every two years; it covers basic lenses - no extra-loveliness - and nhs frames. I'm actually taken aback that people aren't horrified at the idea of spending £500 on glasses as I had no idea that's a normal price. I'm not passing any sort of judgement here, it's just that I've got so far out of normal life!

I'd never spend that much on glasses but I wear contact lenses most of the time, so I just get the cheapest pair I can find for how little I actually wear them. Been short sighted since I was 7.

"Unless the money was on the lenses I’d be livid if DH spent that much"

I do honestly struggle with this attitude. If my partner was livid at me for spending money on glasses, and wanting to feel comfortable in them etc, he wouldn't be my partner long.

I hate the fact my glasses cost as much as they do. But I will not justify that expense to anyone else. They are essential. And I shouldn't (and don't) have to justify that expenditure.

Anyway. This thread probably goes some way to explaining why some people can be so cavalier with other people's glasses. They think of glasses as cheap bits of kit that can maybe be handy for shading your eyes or tweaking your focus a little, and if they're pricey it'll be because of vanity or optional extras. But some of us are wearing utterly necessary, complex, high-tech, precision-engineered personalised medical devices, which require careful handling to avoid damage, and without which we're completely fucked — and which look pretty much the same as any other specs worn for minor vision enhancement or fashion.

You might not be able to tell by looking that the glasses someone's wearing are the most expensive item on their person, or that they need them all the time to function in even the most basic way, or that they can't afford to replace them, so just don't ask to try them on, clean them for someone as a "favour", take them right off somebody's face without asking, fuck about with the hinges, touch the lenses, or any fucking thing else that I've experienced from idiots over several decades of wearing glasses.

Drives me almost to a point of paranoia sometimes. An eye-screener once "helpfully" offered to take my glasses from me and put them aside. After finishing, he vaguely and invisibly gestured for me to retrieve them myself from the bench across the room, so I tentatively walked over, sleep-walker style, only to find he'd plonked them there lens-down. Now I don't trust anyone at all with them. I had to be persuaded quite strongly to give my glasses up to one of the nurses when I had an endoscopy a few months ago, only conceding when they explained exactly what they'd do with them — of course, once they've been taken from me, I can't see where they've been put, or anything much that's further than 10cm from my eyes. Just fuzzy swimming blobs. It's like taking my legs from me and promising you'll take care of them and give them back.

I guess glasses in general are so ubiquitous that people don't recognise glasses as essentially medical equipment/disability aids for people like me, or realise that to meet my needs they have to be quite expensive, and that they shouldn't treat them the same way they treat their fucking pound shop ready readers.

GRARGH that felt cathartic.

@TheCoffeeNebula oh I hear you!!!

I hate peoole touching my glasses.

I had my glasses knocked off my face at a sporting event (spectators) and luckily I caught them (complete fluke as I couldn't see) but the legs were bent. The person who did it didn't get why I was upset, as I "fixed" them enough to get them on my face to get home, but without them I wouldn't be able to drive, or actually see. He didn't realise that it was £500 worth of stuff he knocked off mt face. Yet he was much more careful with his phone etc

I hate not having them on at the hairdressers etc for any length of time as I feel quite vulnerable without them.

So so true

I think I remember a thread a while back where someone asked whats the most expensive thing you're wearing and I was thinking, god all my clothes are cheap, probably about 20 quid an item, until someone on the thread pointed out their most expensive item was their glasses, I thought my god, Im wearing something worth 500 quid there, like a designer handbag or something!!

You make a good point. OP, how much did you pay/are you paying for your phone?

Yes, glasses can easily cost £500. A lot of people are ignorant about prescriptions and lenses though.

Jesus. I can imagine the lurching sensation in that moment, when your sight is suddenly knocked away from you. I feel the same vulnerability as you do, if I have to take my glasses off in public. If your uncorrected vision is similar to mine or worse, it's practically useless for safely navigating any environment or interacting with other people, and as we're usually well corrected by glasses, we've no experience of getting by without much useful sight.

People often can't seem to grasp how little I actually see without glasses. Maybe I explain, maybe they're surprised or disbelieving at how bad it is and that glasses can fix something so bad — and ten minutes later they're expecting me to see their facial expression from 3 feet away while I'm cleaning my glasses. So it doesn't surprise me that he didn't really get how shaken you must've been by almost losing your ability to see (temporarily), especially if you haven't had reason to explain to him how poor your uncorrected vision is — and this thread is ample evidence that many people have no idea it can quite reasonably be the financial equivalent of knocking a brand new decent-spec phone out of your hand (except that, in the case of a phone, you could replace it with a cheapie while you save up).

I can't remember whether you said earlier what you wear glasses for, but mine is mostly shortsightedness. And about 1 in 4 adults have some myopia/shortsightedness, so I think part of the problem is that people think they know what it means: fuzzy distance vision. When you wear glasses for shortsightedness, people will naturally assume you only struggle with distance vision — can't read distant signs, leaves on trees blur together, better pop your glasses on so you get the full benefit of your new 4K TV… For those people, losing your glasses is an irritation, because you'll struggle to follow the sporting event and might not be legal to drive, will be squinting at stuff until you get home and dig out a spare pair, and you'll have to buy new glasses (for a reasonable price).

But 1 in 25 people have high myopia (over -6D), which starts to seriously affect your ability to function without vision correction, (and the cost of the glasses). I'm at about -11D, plus -2D of astigmatism (I mean, pretty bad, but nowhere near the most severe myopia), and I can't focus further away than 10cm. Annoyingly, at 10cm, the images from my right and left eye are so different that they won't mesh with one another, so I can only look with one eye at a time. Luckily I can get very good correction with glasses or contacts. But if what happened to you happened to me, I'd have been quite upset, at least I'm part because it's a reminder of how precarious my day to day function really is, and how easily I can be made completely helpless.