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Almost half of the eye injuries that happen each year happen at home! That means that, in the places people should be safest, they’re still getting over a million eye injuries a year. The good news is that eye injuries are easy to prevent, so let’s take a look at the measures we can take to m...

Modern makeup doesn’t contain lead, mercury, and arsenic like it used to in bygone eras. Still, how safe is it around our eyes? We’ve all heard that beauty is pain, but we in the eye care business have to put our foot down when it comes to unnecessary eye infection and injury risks. We’re n...

Colored contact lenses are sometimes the perfect final touch to take a Halloween costume to the next level. Unfortunately, not all costume lenses are created equal — or with equal concern for wearer safety. With Halloween coming up, we want to give all of our costume-loving patients some guidan...

Dentists will tell you that you should have a dental exam every six months, but what about eye exams? Eye health is a little different than dental health, but preventative care is still a good idea, even when you don’t need a new prescription for your glasses or contacts. The human eye is incre...

A lot changes as we get older, including our eyesight. As we age, we should be vigilant in watching for signs of age-related vision loss, because early diagnosis is critical in preventing many sight-threatening conditions from progressing. We want our patients to be as informed as possible so tha...

As eye care professionals, we’re big fans of eye protection, and that includes eye protection in sports. 90 percent of eye injuries can be prevented by wearing the right eye protection, which means 27,000 out of the annual 30,000 sports-related eye injuries in America could be avoided with this...

Just because we work with human eyesight, it doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate some of the unique eyes in nature. Depending on how they hunt (or avoid being hunted), where they live, and even how big they are, animals have a wide array of vision adaptations that human eyes don’t have. Let’...

Many who have to rely heavily on digital devices for work have felt the discomfort of digital eye strain. Even if you’re on a device for social or entertainment reasons rather than professional ones, you might be familiar with this problem too. It only takes two hours of screen time per day to ...

What comes to mind when you think of a school nurse’s office? We’re guessing your list probably includes vinyl recovery beds, jars full of wooden tongue depressors, and the big E eye chart. For over a century and a half, that big E chart (officially called the Snellen chart) has been an excel...

Can you recognize the symptoms of conjunctivitis (pink eye) when you see them? The main ones are redness, itchiness, and either watery or thick discharge. Conjunctivitis is the inflammation of the conjunctiva, which is the clear outer layer of tissue that covers the surface of our eyes, as well a...

“20/20 vision” and “perfect eyesight” are often used interchangeably, but they really shouldn’t be. There is a wide range of vision problems that have nothing to do with refractive errors like nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. These problems tend to go massively undiagno...

Kids often struggle to adjust to having to wear glasses. They’re already used to not being able to see clearly; the strange feeling of the glasses on their nose and ears and possibly teasing from their peers might not seem like a great trade for clear vision. What is a parent to do? Good eyesig...

Eating carrots might not really give you great night vision, but certain foods do have eye health benefits. Choosing good, nutritious foods to eat is critical for overall health. There are also a few ways it will specifically help to keep our eyes healthier, including lowering our risk of develop...

Using makeup to enhance your style or look your best can get a little trickier when glasses or contacts are in the equation. For glasses wearers, your makeup approach might have to adjust depending on what kind of frames you have and whether your prescription makes your eyes look bigger or smalle...

What are some of the things we can do to keep our eyes healthy? Eat carrots? Wear sunglasses? While carrots do provide good nutrients for our eyes and we definitely recommend wearing sunglasses any time you’re in the sun during the brightest hours of the day, no matter what time of year it is, ...

In the US alone, cataracts affect over 20 million adults 40 and older and half of all seniors age 80 and up. Over time, the lenses in our eyes can become clouded by clumps of protein, resulting in worsening symptoms like reduced night vision, light sensitivity, glare, halo effects around lights, ...

Before diving into the pool this summer, make sure you’re aware of the eye safety facts. What can we do to protect our eyes while we cool off in the pool or have a swim in a lake? What are we protecting our eyes from anyway? Eye Irritants in the Water If you’ve ever felt a burning, stinging s...

We all love celebrating Independence Day with some good food, friends and family, and a dazzling display of fireworks. However, it’s easy to forget that fireworks are explosives. Injuries from fireworks are so common that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) publishes yearly reports on...

Our eyebrows and eyelashes aren’t just there for decoration. They’re not even just there for helping us make different facial expressions or to make our eyes stand out. They’re actually the first line of defense our eyes have against airborne contaminants and other hazards. How Eyelashes Pr...

Things are heating up for summer! For a lot of us, that probably means spending more time outside, but it also means more exposure to harmful UV rays. Are you prepared with the proper sun protection, particularly sunglasses? UV Rays Versus Healthy Vision Even if we’re careful not to look direct...

When we pick out new glasses, we want frames that will help us look our best. Glasses are a huge part of a person’s look — why do you think nobody recognizes Superman behind the Clark Kent glasses? Because of the difference glasses make to our appearance, there’s a lot to consider when choo...

Have you ever stopped to think about how amazing the human eye is? These complicated organs take light waves bouncing off the things in front of us and convert those into a continuous stream moving images that are accurate and detailed. They arguably connect us to our surroundings more than any o...

Being a successful athlete isn’t just about speed and strength — it’s also about vision. In order to be able to perform at their peak physical ability, athletes also need to be able to see and effectively and quickly process and respond to visual information, and that involves a number of d...

Men and women might not come from different planets, but there are certainly a lot of differences between the two — even with eye health. Women, unfortunately, tend to be more vulnerable to a number of eye diseases, even if they are less likely than men to sustain a sight-threatening eye injury...

Spring is a beautiful season with lots of flowers and vibrant greens...but it can be hard to enjoy when you have allergies. So why does springtime leave so many of us with itchy, red, and puffy eyes? How can we be sure it’s allergies and not something else, and what can we do to keep our eyes f...

Most of us rub our eyes many times in the course of the day without really thinking about it. Whether we’re tired, our eyes feel dry or itchy, or there’s something stuck in one of them, it seems like the easiest way to make it feel better is to rub them a little. Unfortunately, doing that is ...

Do you know how many times you blink in a minute? Probably not off the top of your head, but it’s an important number, because blinking is essential to good eye health. On average, adults blink between 10 and 20 times every minute. Each blink only takes a tenth of a second, but it’s a very im...

If you suffer from frequent headaches, it might be time to schedule an eye exam. For many people, headaches can be a symptom of uncorrected vision problems. This doesn’t happen in all cases of uncorrected or undiagnosed vision problems, and of course not all headaches are caused by vision probl...

Some people might think of indoor tanning as the safer alternative to sunbathing, but that is far from accurate. In fact, in a briefing before the US Congress, eye doctors, dermatologists, surgeons, and other physicians spoke about the dangers of indoor tanning, and the World Health Organization ...

In honor of Workplace Eye Wellness Month, it’s time for a look at the steps we can all take to protect our eyes while we work. Depending on what type of job you have, your eyes will face different risks of health issues or injury, so we want to approach this in two broad categories: office jobs...

Whether you wear corrective lenses or not, regular eye exams are critical for maintaining good eye health! March is Save Your Vision Month, which makes it a great time to take a closer look at a few of the biggest reasons to make sure an eye exam makes it into our schedules at least every other y...

For people age 50 and older, age-related macular degeneration is one of the leading causes of irreversible vision loss. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) causes the gradual loss of central vision through the deterioration of the macula, or the part of the retina that gives us our sharp, deta...

Corrective lenses are wonderful things that allow us to enjoy the advantages of good eyesight, and we need to take good care of them. Whether you wear glasses or contact lenses, we want to offer you a few tips on how to make sure they last as long as they should so you can get the most out of the...

Just because someone is colorblind, it doesn’t mean they see the world like a black-and-white movie. That type of color blindness does exist and is called monochromacy, but it is by far the rarest form of color blindness. There are different ways it can happen, just like there are different way...

Eye color is one of the first traits we notice when we meet someone new. If you’ve ever met someone with two different eye colors, then you’ve seen what heterochromia looks like. Only three out of every five hundred people have it, though, so it’s not that common (but you might have seen an...

What is your routine as you get ready for bed? Most of our nightly routines include items like brushing teeth, taking out contact lenses, and washing our faces, but how many of us also make sure to check our smartphones for any last updates before we go to sleep? This probably isn’t the best wa...

Presbyopia is farsightedness caused by the increasing rigidity of the lens in the eye as we age. It affects nearly everyone older than 65, and for the 42 percent of Americans who are already nearsighted, this creates a complication. People who previously had 20/20 vision can just grab a pair of r...

There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a new pair of glasses, but what about new contacts? There may not be quite as much variety because you don’t have to think about frame shape and color, but there are still several different types of contact lenses to choose from. Let’s take ...

Our eyes are incredible, complicated organs. Many different components need to work together for us to be able to see. This means that when one of those components breaks down, it can cause big problems for eyesight. A component you might not think of is the pressure of the fluid inside the eye. ...

Protecting our eyesight is one of the most basic things we can do to maintain a good quality of life. One in six adults deals with a sight-threatening eye problem, and many more than that will experience increasing vision loss with age. Leading causes of blindness and low vision are age-related d...

In winter, when the days are shorter, we tend to end up driving more at night. For those of us without perfect eyesight, this can be an increasingly stressful adjustment to make every year, and we should all take the dangers of night driving into careful consideration. It won’t just make a diff...

The majority of people will experience changes to their eyesight as they age. It’s essential to stay on the watch for signs of age-related vision loss the older we get. As eye health professionals, one of our priorities is making sure our patients are informed so that they both know what to exp...

When we think of sunburns, most of us probably imagine sandy beaches and summer heat, but we can get sunburned in any season, including winter. In fact, winter can be even more dangerous in some ways. Just because most of our skin is bundled up from the cold, that doesn’t mean our eyes are safe...

Did you know that babies have to learn how to see, just as much as they have to learn how to walk and talk? That’s right, learning how to use their eyes and understand what they’re seeing is a process. There’s a lot we can do as parents to help them develop essential visual skills — every...

The most common health effects that come to mind when we think of smoking are lung cancer and bad teeth, but it doesn’t stop there. Smoking is harmful to every system in the body, and it’s also harmful to our vision. A smoking habit can do more damage to our eyesight than disease can, in a fe...

Many of our patients come to us with the same questions without realizing it. These are some of the questions we hear most often, and we’re sure that more people haven’t spoken up but don’t know the answers either. 1. “How often do I need to visit the optometrist?” Every patient is uniq...

Diabetes is a disease that can negatively affect health in many ways, including healthy eyesight. Diabetes brings with it an increased risk of developing several different eye diseases. These are grouped under the umbrella term “diabetic eye disease,” and they include cataracts, glaucoma, dia...

Our eyes are amazing, complex organs, but there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong. One that we want to educate our patients on today is retinal detachment. This is a serious, sight-threatening condition that affects 1 in every 300 people at some point in their lives, but it can be treated ...

The earliest example of someone using a tool to assist with vision (that we know of) is Roman philosopher Seneca. He used a glass globe of water to magnify text when he was reading. Around the same time (60 AD), Emperor Nero was using an emerald to see gladiator fights better. Glasses have obviou...

Sometimes it’s hard to get a full night’s sleep, but when we don’t, we definitely feel it. In fact, studies even show that not getting enough sleep has many of the same effects on the mind and body as alcohol. There’s an interesting relationship between our quality and quantity of sleep a...

Some vision problems are so extreme that simple glasses or contacts aren’t enough to completely fix them. These sorts of serious vision problems fall under the umbrella of visual impairment, and those of us with functional eyesight should be aware of these problems so that we can be ready to he...

Halloween is our favorite spooky time of year, but we need to talk about the potential dangers of costume contact lenses. The right pair of colored lenses will make a great final touch to an amazing Halloween costume, but not all contact lenses are created equal, and we want to make sure our pati...

Nearly half of all eye injuries each year occur in the same place: the home. That’s over a million eye injuries per year happening in the place where we should be safer than anywhere else! Fortunately, 90 percent of eye injuries are preventable, and there’s a lot we can do to minimize the ris...

Cosmetics have come a long way from the toxic powders used in the Renaissance and Victorian eras. We’re very happy that modern makeup is free of ingredients like lead, arsenic, and mercury. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s all perfectly safe to have around the eyes. The old saying might be “...

When was the last time you came in for an eye exam? If you don’t need a new glasses prescription, it might not seem necessary to schedule another eye exam, but eyes are very complicated organs with a lot of ways for things to go wrong. That’s why it’s important to make sure they’re workin...

As we get older, our bodies don’t function as well as they used to, and that includes our eyes. However, there’s a lot we can do to keep our eyes healthy, which is why we’d like to take a look at a few of the most common age-related vision and eye problems and what can be done to minimize t...

With the new school year under way, a lot of student athletes are getting back into their sports. Participating in a sport is thrilling and challenging, but it’s also potentially dangerous. Over 30,000 Americans are treated for sports-related eye injuries in a single year. Fortunately, as many ...

Our world is filled with a staggering array of animal life, and today we’d like to take a closer look at some of the best eyes nature has to offer. Instead of trying to identify one animal that has the best eyes overall, we’re breaking it up into categories: underwater vision, night vision, c...

Our modern digital devices give us access to all kinds of useful tools and information...but they’re not great for our eyes. All it takes to give us a 90 percent chance of developing digital eye strain is two hours of screen time per day. With so many of us on our devices for much longer than t...

Most of us remember going to the school nurse as a child, covering one eye at a time, and reading off lines from the big E chart to find out if we needed glasses. Unfortunately, as efficient as they may seem, these simple vision screenings don’t catch everything that could be wrong with a child...

Have your eyes been incredibly itchy, watery, and red lately? These are the main symptoms of conjunctivitis, or pink eye, which is the inflammation of the conjunctiva — the clear, thin outer layer of the whites of our eyes and the insides of our eyelids. Luckily, conjunctivitis is both preventa...

It’s easy to assume that being colorblind means living in a black-and-white film full time, but that’s not how it works in the vast majority of cases. Color Vision And Genetics A recessive gene located on the X chromosome is the main culprit behind most color blindness, which is why men are m...

Wearing glasses for the first time can be a difficult adjustment for any child. Being able to see clearly might not always seem worth it to them compared to how strange the glasses feel on their nose and ears or what their peers think, so what can you do as a parent to help them get in the habit ...

We use makeup to hide blemishes, enhance our natural beauty, and create our own personal style, but for glasses wearers, this can get a little tricky. We know the struggle. Makeup styles that would look fantastic on someone without glasses might become barely noticeable once the glasses go on. So...

One of the best things you can do to keep your eyes healthy is to keep your body active! Exercising helps us get stronger, stay in shape, and feel great. An active lifestyle is essential for our overall health, with benefits such as reducing our risk of developing chronic health problems like hea...

Cataracts are the world’s leading cause of blindness. In the US alone, they affect over 20 million adults over the age of forty and half of seniors aged eighty and up. Babies are sometimes born with congenital cataracts and require surgery so that their vision can develop normally. How Do Catar...

School’s out and it’s time for summer! For many of us, summer time means a lot of trips to the pool, but before we dive in, we should take a look at what we should be doing to protect our eyes while we’re cooling off underwater. Invest In A Good Pair Of Goggles Have you ever felt a burning,...

The Fourth of July is a wonderful day to enjoy good food, good company, and, of course, an awe-inspiring fireworks display. If we want to be able to keep enjoying the sight of the rockets’ red glare in future years, however, we need to make sure we’re not putting our eyes at unnecessary risk ...

If you’ve ever had a series of bright, flickering lights gradually obscure your vision and then go away, you might have had an ocular migraine. We typically think of migraines as the painful headaches that affect about 10 percent of the U.S. population, but the visual distortions that come with...

According to one MIT study, people might have a hard time identifying you if you didn’t have your eyebrows! While our eyebrows and eyelashes play a big role in the way our faces look, they aren’t just there to be pretty. In addition to helping us express emotion and stand out from the crowd, ...

Summer is a great time to get some cool sunglasses and relax on the beach, but we should really be wearing our sunglasses all year. Choosing the right pair of sunglasses is a little more complicated than finding the ones that best suit your style. Our first priority should always be finding the p...

Those of us who wear glasses know what a difference they can make to the way our faces look. Some of our friends might even have trouble recognizing us without our glasses at first. Because our glasses have such a big effect on our appearance, it’s crucial to understand how to take advantage of...

With summer just around the corner, a lot of us are probably looking forward to getting a lot of sun. However, it’s important to be careful not to expose our eyes (or our skin) to too much ultraviolet radiation, as it can cause a number of problems both in the short-term and the long-term. What...

Our eyes are amazing, complicated organs. Many different parts have to work together to convert the light bouncing off everything around us into a continuous stream of images that we can understand. What are these different parts and how do they contribute to our ability to see? The Parts Of The ...

We tend to only think of tears when something makes us cry, whether we’re watching a touching or tragic movie or we’re laughing so hard that our eyes water. However, tears are really the unsung heroes of eye health. They come in different types and there’s more to them than just water, so l...

Spring is here! Unfortunately, for many of us, spring comes with seasonal allergies that leave our eyes red, puffy, and itchy. Why does this happen to us every year? What can we do to help our eyes enjoy the spring season better? What Causes Seasonal Allergies? Technically, allergies aren’t lim...

We all know there are differences between men and women, but it might surprise you that some of those differences have to do with our eyes! In general, women are less likely than men to sustain an eye injury during their lifetime, but the unfortunate tradeoff is being more susceptible to various ...

If you’ve ever been near the pharmacy in a grocery store, you’ve probably seen the aisles of nutrition supplements for sale. These products claim to have a variety of benefits, but today we just want to focus on two: flaxseed oil and fish oil, and what they can do to combat dry eye. The Dange...

You’ve heard of reading glasses. You’ve heard of sunglasses. But what are computer glasses? Have your eyes ever felt tired and itchy after a long day of working in front of a computer screen? Or maybe you’ve been having more headaches than usual, or your vision gets blurry at some point in ...

March is Workplace Eye Wellness Month, and we want to make sure our patients have all the information they need to protect their eyes at work! The type of job you have will determine what kinds of risks your eyes may be in for injury or health issues, so we’re going to break them up into two ma...

We all have busy lives, so it can be easy to forget about things like scheduling regular eye exams. That’s why we’re using this blog post to give you five great reasons to remember your eyesight when you’re planning your time! 1. An Ounce Of Prevention… Many eye diseases, such as glaucoma...

Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is one of the leading causes of vision loss for people over the age of 50. In AMD patients, vision loss occurs as the macula deteriorates over time. The macula is the part of the retina responsible for sharp, central vision, AMD can make it difficult or impo...

We all love our glasses and contact lenses for letting us enjoy the details of the world around us and perform our daily tasks. If we want them to do their job well and last as long as they should, though, we need to take proper care of them. Here are our top tips for glasses and contact lens mai...

It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of a smart contact lens seemed like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s pretty close to becoming science fact. What exactly are smart contact lenses, and what would they be for? Let’s take a look at a few of the different possibilities we could be seei...

Let’s face it: glasses and contact lenses are pretty amazing. For so many people around the world, two little pieces of clear material are the difference between living in a blurry, muddled world and being able to read, drive, and appreciate the details of their surroundings. How do these amazi...

Do you remember in old cartoons when a character would see a delicious plate of food and his eyes would comically bulge out like footballs? That pointed cone shape of the eye in such scenes isn’t much different from the effects of keratoconus, a vision disorder in which the cornea (the front pa...

Nearly everyone over the age of 65 will experience a reduced elasticity of the lenses of their eyes — a condition called presbyopia. Those of us lucky enough to have perfect vision until that age will only require reading glasses to help with up-close vision. However, for the 42 percent of Amer...

Compared to all the different frame styles and lens shapes of glasses, it might seem like contact lenses are much simpler. However, there are actually many different types of contact lenses too, varying in shape, durability, and material, and we’ll be taking all of these variables into account ...

Human eyesight is an incredibly complex system, and a problem anywhere along the way can lead to seriously compromised vision. One such problem is glaucoma, a group of eye conditions that affect millions of people in the US, making it the second most common cause of vision loss and blindness in t...

One of the most essential things we can do to maintain our quality of life is protect our eyesight. Vision loss increases with age, and one in every six adults deals with a sight-threatening eye problem. Some of the leading causes of blindness and low vision are age-related diseases like macular ...

An estimated 60 percent of children with learning difficulties have undiagnosed vision problems, and 80 percent of learning is visual. This puts these children at a serious disadvantage in their education and their social development. So what can we do as parents to make sure this doesn’t happe...

An autoimmune disease is a disorder that causes the immune system to mistake healthy cells for dangerous pathogens and attack them. Many autoimmune diseases impact the health and function of the eyes. It’s important to be aware of these affects if you or someone you love has an autoimmune disea...

Because it’s so much colder outside in winter, our instinct might be to assume that we’re safe from damage from the sun. Unfortunately, this is not the case. We are just as vulnerable to harmful UV rays in winter as we are in summer. Our skin might be mostly bundled up from the cold, keeping ...

None of us is born with fully developed eyesight. It takes time for the structures of our eyes to finish growing, and it also takes time to learn how to use them. As parents, it’s important to understand how eyesight develops so that we can encourage healthy vision in our children and recognize...

Have you noticed any changes in your eyesight in the last few years? The older we get, the more important it is for us to be on the watch for symptoms of age-related vision loss. As your partners in life-long healthy vision, we at Vision Source® want to make sure you’re prepared. Common Types ...

It’s no secret that as we age, our eyesight suffers. Fortunately, there’s a lot we can do to preserve our vision. A few of the most common age-related vision problems are diabetic eye disease, glaucoma, cataracts, and macular degeneration. What’s crucial with many of these conditions is ear...

Nights are long in the winter, and that means fewer hours of daylight for our morning and evening commutes. Many of us feel safer driving during the day, particularly if our eyesight isn’t perfect. The dangers of night driving are very real, and we should all be taking them seriously, because o...

November is Diabetes Awareness Month, and that means it's time to talk about how diabetes impacts eye health. With diabetes comes the increased risk of developing a few different eye diseases, which are often referred to under the umbrella term of diabetic eye disease. These conditions include di...

The colors we see and the emotions we feel have an interesting and complex relationship. Have you ever heard the expressions “green with envy,” “feeling blue,” or “seeing red”? How did these colors come to be so closely tied to emotional connotations that we have figures of speech abo...

When we don’t get a good night’s sleep, we can really feel it in the morning. That grogginess, difficulty concentrating, and slowed reaction time — we all know the feeling. Lack of sleep, especially when it happens on a regular basis, can have many negative effects on our health, both short...