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What’s a poor-sighted person’s worst nightmare? Breaking a pair of glasses. If you haven’t been glasses shopping lately, brace yourself to empty your bank account: glasses are expensive. With all the options available (designer frames, light-changing lenses, wire or plastic frames, and enough colors to fill a Crayola crayon box), it’s no wonder people would rather glue their glasses together than go shopping for a new pair.

So where should you buy your glasses? Where can you walk out with a pair of quality frames for a price that won’t break the bank? Which places will still give you expert staff, quality fittings, and tons of selection? Here are the best places to buy your next pair of frames. Happy shopping!

The Best Place to Buy Your Glasses: Costco Optical

According to Consumer Reports, the top place to get your next pair of glasses is Costco Optical, where the average cost of a pair of glasses ran around $157. Your next best bet if you want to shop local (or you don’t have a Costco membership) is an independent glasses shop around town, where consumers paid around $211 a pair. No local eyeglass shops around? Head to a private doctor’s office. A pair from your local private doctor will set you back about $212.

The Worst: JCPenney

Don’t go to JCPenney, America’s Best Contacts & Eyeglasses, Visionworks, Eyemasters, or Pearle Vision, cautions Consumer Reports. These five companies had the five worst rankings of all glasses providers.

Curious about what your friends’ favorite glasses stores are? Consider installing a survey from kissinsights.com to learn where your friends get their specs.

If you wear glasses or contact lenses, you know exactly how expensive taking care of our eyes can be. Traditional health insurance usually doesn’t cover eye exams, glaucoma screenings, or corrective lenses. However, if you have a hard time seeing without glasses or contacts, it can dramatically impact your life to be without them. In some cases, it can even prevent you from driving a car or doing a good job at work. Let’s take a look at how vision insurance can help.

Vision Insurance Pays for Most Services

When you have vision insurance, it will pay for virtually every service provided by an optometrist. Whether you need a new eye exam, glasses, contact lenses, or x-rays, you’ll only have to pay a small percentage of the total cost. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars when you’re done with your regular vision screenings, you’ll only receive a small bill. Depending on your coverage level, it might be completely paid for! Take advantage of an online insurance quote today to find the best price on a policy that meets your specific needs.

Vision Insurance Can Even Pay for Lasik Eye Surgery

If you’ve always wanted to have Lasik Eye Surgery, vision insurance may be your answer. Many policies cover most of this cost. Just imagine how great it would be to not even need glasses or contact lenses anymore! Being able to see with perfect to near-perfect vision at all times is a dream many people with 20/20 vision take for granted. No more foggy glasses, dirty contact lenses, or squinting to see when you first get up in the morning! This surgery has been used by thousands of people including famous athletes and celebrities. Choose a feature-rich vision policy to help you pay for Lasik!

Don’t take your sight for granted! Shop around for a policy today to protect your vision.

If you are considering buying contact lenses for you child, you may be holding off for certain reasons. Is my child old enough? What about eye infection?

Over 30 million Americans wear contact lenses. Contact lenses are comfortable, flexible, and eliminate the need for glasses. They improve conditions such as farsightedness, nearsightedness, astigmatism, and problems with reading.

Contact lenses can cause infection, but if you are responsible, there should be no problem. Infection is caused by poor hygiene and not wearing your contacts properly. If you take care of your contacts and your eyes you shouldn’t have a problem with eye infection. Follow the doctor recommended wearing schedule. Don’t wear your contacts at night if they are not meant to be worn at night as this can cause dry and irritated eyes. Also, don’t wear a certain pair of contacts longer than the amount of weeks the doctor recommends. Remember to have routine eye exams so you can keep your prescription up to date.

There is no age limit to wearing contacts. Some parents are concerned about if their child is old enough to wear contact lenses. If your child is responsible and you can trust them to keep their contacts clean, it is perfectly fine to allow your child to wear contacts. Many eye doctors begin encouraging contact lenses around the ages of 11 to 14. Even though this is the age doctors encourage contact lenses, seniors and even babies can wear them.

You child may want contact lenses so they don’t have to wear glasses. We all know children and teens are self-conscious, and they may feel more attractive if they are wearing contacts rather than glasses. There is really nothing to worry about when considering buying contacts for your child. They aren’t very expensive either and most insurances cover part of the cost for every box. If your child is responsible and can follow directions given by your eye doctor, there should be no problem.

Your eyes contribute to about 85% of your sensory input. Keeping your eyes healthy is very important. Not only will you save money by not buying eye glasses, medication, and surgery, but because vision is the most dominant sense, therefore, it is very important to protect your eyes.

The best way to keep your eyes healthy is by having routine exams. Eye impairment is difficult to detect at the beginning, and your eye doctor can help detect the problem before it gets worse.

Stress leaves an impact on the eyes, as it does on many parts of the body. Finding ways to relieve your stress won’t only keep your eyes healthy, but will help the rest of your body as well. Not only do you need to ease your body’s stress, but you need to relieve the stress you put on your eyes. Activities such as staring at a computer screen will stress your eyes out. Take a break every few minutes just to look around the room and blink a couple times. This will help with the pressure you put on your optic nerves and will reduce dry eyes.

Protect your eyes from sunlight. If your eyes are exposed to bright sunlight, it may damage your sight slightly. Staring directly at the sun may damage the cells in your retina. Wear sunglasses, especially on bright days, to reduce your risk of cell damage.

Wear a good pair of safety glasses when doing risky activities. If your work requires you to wear safety glasses, find a good pair that completely covers your eyes. Working with chemicals is very dangerous, as they can splash in your eyes and cause temporary blindness and permanent eye impairment.

There are many ways to protect yourself from eye damage. Along with these tips, you should research ways to protect yourself from eye infections and disease. Your eyes are very important and you should do what you can to protect them.

Myopia (nearsightedness) is a common vision problem. With so many people using computers and doing other close-range activities for long hours each day, myopia cases have become even more common. Getting vision correction in the form of contact lenses or glasses, both of which actually gradually make your myopia worse, or getting corrective laser eye surgery, which has been known to permanently damage the eye, are the only options most people are given. You do have some more natural, less dangerous alternatives.

Eyes exercises are one solution, but as beneficial as they can be, they can also take weeks to improve your vision enough to not need correction. For instant 20/20 vision correction that helps your eyes improve instead of gradually making them worse, try pinhole glasses.

If you have never heard of pinhole glasses, don’t be too surprised. Most people haven’t. However, they’re worth knowing about, because they are significantly more affordable than prescription glasses, do not distort or round things as prescription glasses sometimes do, are not affected by the lenses being scratched, do not have to be cleaned constantly for fingerprints, and work even for people who have different prescriptions in each eye.

Pinholes work by allowing only a tiny amount of light to enter the eye. Because myopia and other vision problems are often caused by light refracting incorrectly into your side vision, pinholes correct your vision instantly by only allowing light to enter through your central vision. They last as long as the pinholes don’t break–no buying new glasses for an updated prescription! Pinhole glasses look like sunglasses with tiny round holes spaced evenly apart in a pattern across the lenses; they can replace bifocals, clearing vision both up close and far away. They do dim brightness similar to shades, and should not be used while driving or operating machinery.

Astigmatism is a condition in which parts of the eye are shaped abnormally, causing a refractive error (mistakes in how your eye sees light) and making it difficult to focus on objects clearly. Astigmatism comes in two varieties: regular, and irregular. Regular astigmatism is caused by an abnormal shape to the lens or cornea of the eye, which divides the light that hits it into two points of entry into the eye. The resulting effect is like looking at two very slightly different views of the same object; for example, a round dot may appear to be a stretched-out oval or even a line to a person with astigmatism, depending upon how severe their case is.
Irregular astigmatism is caused by corneal scarring; scattering in the crystalline lens is also a possible cause. Either way, irregular astigmatism cannot be corrected with eyeglasses, but can be corrected with the use of contact lenses. Contact lenses can assist with regular astigmatism, as well; a special kind of contacts called toric lenses are needed to correct both crystalline lens and corneal distortions. Toric lenses have a particular shape: one raised ring within another larger raised ring, like two donuts nested together. Toric lenses can correct both kinds of astigmatism, though they must continue tobe used because they are not a permanent fix.
Symptoms of astigmatism include blurry vision, particularly horizontal or vertical blurring, seeing straight lines as curved or tilted, headaches, eyestrain, fatigue, and frequent squinting to try to see more clearly. Milder cases may not have many or any of these symptoms except for the difficulty in focusing on objects. Astigmatism is a very common vision problem; several studies of local populations found that over 30 percent of people had the condition.
Astigmatism is commonly treated with eyeglasses, contact lenses, or various types of laser surgery. Regular LASIK surgery, lens transplants, and corneal re-shaping via rigid gas-permeable contacts are among the permanent fixes for the condition. The natural alternative is eye exercises, which are said to cure nearsightedness and farsightedness as well if followed properly. There are different eye exercise programs for different conditions.

Orthokeratology, commonly known as Ortho-K, is the practice is reshaping the cornea by wearing overnight contact lenses so that you don’t have to wear any vision correction during the day. Ortho-K contacts are rigid, gas-permeable lenses that are specially shaped to fit your eye; computer-generated corneal topography maps out the exact unique shape of your corneas so that the fit is custom. Ortho-K contacts are an effective method of correcting your vision while you sleep; individuals who use Ortho-K can go through their day without wearing any glasses or contacts, and can stave off laser surgery if they want.
Ortho-K reshapes the cornea by moving the cells that cover the surface of it into different positions, as well as by compressing some of them tighter together. Contrary to a lot of people’s assumptions, Ortho-K does not press on or flatten the cornea itself–in fact, the lens should not even touch the actual cornea, only affect the cells on top of it. This misconception is probably due to the description of the contacts as reshaping the cornea itself, when actually this is not technically true. However, moving the cells on top of the cornea allows the individual to see better since through the shape of the cornea and the moved cells combined is the right shape to refract light correctly.
Ortho-K as we know it was first designed in 1960; the concept for reshaping the cornea has been around since the 1940s, however. Ortho-K was approved for overnight use by the FDA in 2002; it was already available in several other countries by the time it reached Americans, due to differing regulations. Wearing Ortho-K lenses can at first feel uncomfortable, as if there is an eyelash in the person’s eye. However, the discomfort is felt mostly while blinking, which makes sleeping with them on fairly comfortable.
The first month of wear may cause vision errors like ghosting, blurring, starbursts and double-vision, particularly at night, but it will resolve itself once your eyes get accustomed to the lenses. Ortho-K is useful in treating astigmatism, nearsightness and farsightedness.