Coloured Glasses and Visual Stress

Coloured Glasses

Coloured lenses can also be used: they have to be prescribed accurately following a specialist assessment. They are much more costly than overlays, but can be of greater value as the wearer experiences the benefit when reading from boards, posters and screens, as well as from printed pages, eliminating the glare from the page he or she is reading or writing on.

Against that is the fact that sometimes colour preferences seem to change, which means another assessment and another pair of coloured glasses. For a list of optomerists in the UK who prescribe coloured lenses click on the text link in this sentence.

Are glasses the same colour as overlays?

No. For example, a person may choose a yellow overlay and benefit from blue lenses. The colour of the lenses can only be assessed by optometrists or orthoptists who use a device called the Intuitive Colorimeter ®, or by the use of a very large number of coloured trial lenses. Other methods of selecting coloured lenses may be less likely to select the best colour.

Why are glasses a different colour from overlays?

When you wear glasses everything you see is coloured, but you are often unaware of the colouration because you adapt to it and make allowances for it (for example, the colour of light from a normal household light bulb is very yellow in comparison to daylight, but you are never aware of this). When you use an overlay only part of what you see is coloured and the eyes are adapted to white light. The way that the brain processes what you see in the two circumstances is very different.