I buy contact lenses online and I love my Air Optix Night & Day (now “Aqua” for 30 days continuous wear, which is what I was doing anyway) contact lenses and you can wear them almost non stop without issue, as if you have perfectly working eyes, but you still need to take them out from time to time to rest your eyes, particularly if you wear them for longer than you are supposed to like I do.
However, I just bought my first pair of glasses online ever from Glasses Direct and I was quite impressed with it. It definitely beats trying on glasses for hours in the shop under pressure from the assistant, the whole time you can’t actually see any of them because you don’t have your glasses on, particularly when the shop doesn’t have much choice and all you can see are ugly expensive designer brands.
At the moment they even give a free pair of these, which I ended up liking more than the glasses I actually chose.
However, I made a couple of mistakes when buying from there. I’m sharing them here so that others won’t make the same mistakes.
- Get a recent prescription from your optician. Mine never gave me prescriptions when I was young then I kept the same glasses for something like 10 years, then I switched to contact lenses which just have “-1.50″ written on them. This website asks for more numbers than just that, so make sure you get the right prescription. Unfortunately, I got the wrong prescription in one eye.
- Check the dimensions of the glasses before you buy. They vary wildly. The wind pair I actually chose is far too big for my head (supposedly 122mm, closer to 150mm) but the free pair I got (supposedly 119mm, closer to 125mm) fits fine
Luckily for me, they accept returns and seem to have an excellent 14 day from postage, no quibble, replace or refund policy on it. They just don’t refund delivery, but I wouldn’t expect them to.
You know the free pair is “for women with a small head” right… not that you chose them as they were free.
Remember ALL online purchases of anything have a 7 day cooling off period too as you didn’t see what you bought and might change your mind, but I think that might just be time to cancel before it’s sent rather than return it.
At the time, they were under “Rectangle” + “Male”. They seem to have moved them since then, but the others were ridiculously large anyway.