Easy Ways to Clean Your Lenses on the Go

If you wear glasses, you’re probably all too familiar with the experience of having them fog up, get stained with grease and become dirty with other contaminants. When you clean off your eyeglasses, you want to make certain that you’re not shortening their lifespan by scratching at the lenses and causing damage to the frames. Here are some ways that you can clean up your lenses when you are out and about and do minimal damage to the lenses and to the glasses frames themselves.

Water

It’s always best to clean off your glasses with water whenever you can. Water removes dust and, if there is dust on the lenses when you start rubbing them, you’re going to grind that dust into the plastic, causing scratches.

Assuming that you’re away from home and you don’t have your cleaning kit, you can use dish soap to clean off your lenses. Dish soap is a degreaser, which will remove deposits from your skin and sweat.

Put a small amount of dish soap on your fingers and put the glasses under warm running water. Rub in a gentle circular motion with the soap to remove grease. As you clean off the lenses, you’ll notice that the water adheres to them less and less. Once the water more or less runs off of the surface on its own, the lenses are clean.

You can use a toothbrush or your fingers to rub away deposits on the nose pads on your glasses. All you have to do after you wash your glasses is dry them off. Make sure you use a very soft cloth to do this. Never use tissue or toilet paper to wash off glasses. These products are made from wood fiber and they can scratch lenses very easily.

Climate Considerations

Jacksonville, Florida has a climate that’s, unfortunately, rather conducive to getting dirty lenses quite a bit. Between sweating, the humidity and the amount of dust and plant pollen that is sometimes in the air, lenses can become very dirty in a short amount of time.

When you go in for an eye exam in Jacksonville, talk to your eye doctor about your options for lenses. Some lens types have coatings on them that may help you to keep them cleaner and, in some cases, anti-scratch coatings can really do a good job of protecting your lenses from damage when you have to clean them without a proper cleaning kit.

Remember that your vision doctor can probably give you recommendations for cleaning kits, as well. In addition to selling eyewear, a good vision doctor will be able to let their patients know which types of eyewear are best for their application – safety eyewear, sun protective eyewear, etc. – and this can help you to avoid ending up with scratched lenses and other issues on a pair of glasses that you just paid for.

Frame Considerations

You should also ask your eye doctor about any special frames you may need that will go well with the usage you have planned for your eyewear. For example, if you’re going to be wearing your eyewear at a construction site, you’re not going to want a delicate, fashionable pair of frames. Having the right eyewear also makes it easier to clean your glasses. For example, safety glasses oftentimes lack the very delicate nose pads you’ll see on fashion glasses, and that means that they can be cleaned up a bit more roughly than your regular pair of glasses.

If you wear glasses, remember that every time you go to the eye doctor, you can find plenty of options to choose from. A good Northeast Florida eye doctor will be able to provide you with plenty of options to get more out of your eyewear.