• Question: What causes you to wear glasses?

    Asked by 255furk43 to Chris, Joanne, Kathryn, Kieran, Sarah on 9 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Sarah Guerin

      Sarah Guerin answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      Well, your eyes are made up of different parts, that detect light, focus it, and send a signal to your brain. Glasses are normally used if the lens in your eye is weak, and cannot focus light- whether it’s light that’s close, light that is far away, or both. The glass in your glasses helps to focus the light so that you see a clear image. If parts of your eye are weak, then trying to focus light can sometimes give you headaches- I wear glasses so this doesn’t happen to me.

    • Photo: Kathryn Schoenrock

      Kathryn Schoenrock answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      I developed nearsightedness when I was 10. Or that is when I noticed it anyhow. It is caused by my eye being an odd shape- here is a link:

      https://nei.nih.gov/healthyeyes/myopia

    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      The most common problems are refractive errors of the eye. This simply means that the cornea and or the lens of your eye is not bending the light correctly and hence we see things out of focus, either that or your eye develops a slightly different shape (not square or triangle shaped, just a stretched circle). I’m near sighted myself, I can’t see the text on this screen clearly unless I’m less than 20 cm away, and have been wearing either glasses or contacts since I was 7. It got worse and worse from then until about 10 or 11. There’s been a little change since then but nothing too much!

    • Photo: Joanne Duffy

      Joanne Duffy answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      Here’s a cool fact about eyesight! Near-sightedness is getting worse, and computers/phones get blamed for this, but that’s actually not true. It’s because children don’t spend as much time outdoors. Natural sunlight is essential for the correct development of the eyes in childhood and adolescence, and the more time we spend indoors the more near-sightedness we see in the population!

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