Think Your Glasses are Safe? Read This!

Do you own a bench grinder? How about a power saw or hammer? Or maybe a weed eater, power mower or shrub trimmer? Do you do home or auto repairs? OK, so what do all these things have in common, anyhow? Each one can result in significant eye injury, even when be used in an otherwise safe manner. Grinding wheels explode; saws kick up particles; hammers can cause nail heads to chip and fly. Yard implements can launch debris, and cut branches can snap of fall in unanticipated trajectories. Tools can slip unexpectedly and put you in harms way.

An estimated 2.4 million eye injuries occur in the United States each year, and nearly one million Americans have lost some degree of eyesight due to an eye injury, according to Prevent Blindness America.

All About Vision says that experts agree that more than 90 percent of these injuries could be prevented with simple precautions, including wearing safety glasses or protective goggles.
If you are one of the nearly 50% of Americans that wear glasses, you may think that they provide adequate safety against vision-threatening hazards, but that is definitely not a safe assumption. There are two reasons why.

IMPACT RESISTANCE: “Dress” safety, or normal eyewear is required to be able to withstand the impact of a 5/8-inch steel ball weighing approximately 0.56 ounce dropped from a height of 50 inches onto the center of a lens. “Industrial” safety lenses up that to using a 1” ball dropped from a height of 60”. The bottom line is that true safety lenses can withstand a MUCH greater impact than standard lenses.

LENS RETENTION: Even if a lens is capable of withstanding the greater impact, that benefit is lost if the entire lens is dislodged from the frame, and driven into the eye socket area, causing great injury or blindness. You may have noticed that most frames have a “V” groove, and lenses have a corresponding “V” bevel; the two work together to keep the lenses in the frame. On true safety glasses the V groove is about 33% deeper than dress glasses so that lens retention is dramatically increased and preventing injury.

Short and simple, your eyeglasses are no match for the hazards they are commonly exposed to when working around the house or yard. Here are two MORE reasons why you need safety glasses: your right eye and your left eye. You have one of each, they are irreplaceable, and they are designed to work together.

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