3 Tips For Buying Prescription Swimming Goggles
- 28 Aug 2018
It can be a confusing world, trying to find the right prescription goggles. We've put together some useful tips, and answered some common questions to help you with the process of selecting your first pair of prescription lens goggles!
1. Understanding the Lens
Prescription swimming goggles come with specially manufactured lenses, available in a variety of strengths. The scale on which these lenses vary is known as the “dioptre” scale. This style of lens and the dioptre scale are similar to those commonly used in generic reading glasses. The strength will be a close match to your own prescription, but may not be as close as the glasses purchased directly from your optician.
The benefits of dioptre lenses are that they're more easily accessible and cheaper than having your lenses specially made at your opticians, plus they provide excellent results! Negative dioptre lenses are the most common, suited to people with myopic or near-sighted vision. The available lenses usually range from -1.5 to -10.0 on the dioptre scale, in steps of 0.5.
2. Find the Correct Dioptre Strength
A large part of the battle when buying your first set of prescription goggles is selecting the correct dioptre lens.
Here's a little snippet from Wikipedia on the subject of dioptre as a unit of measurement.
“A dioptre (UK), or diopter (US), is a unit of measurement of the optical power of a lens or curved mirror, which is equal to the reciprocal of the focal length measured in metres (that is, 1/metres). It is thus a unit of reciprocal length. For example, a 3-dioptre lens brings parallel rays of light to focus at 1⁄3 metre. “dioptre strength then you're pretty much ready to start shopping for your new optical goggles. However, if you don't yet know which strength of lens you require, you'll have to do a bit of working out.
Now, that sounds quite technical, and now you're probably wondering how you can easily work out which strength of lens you'll need. Luckily there is a simple and easy vision test created by the folks at aclens.com. Just download the PDF file here, print it out at 100% scale, follow the steps and take the test yourself!
If you have access to your most recent eye test results, you can work out the required dioptre for each eye by using this simple formula:
1/2 of the cylinder + sphere = dioptre strength
“Cylinder” is the degree of astigmatism in the eye, and “sphere” represents the degree of weakness in dioptres. Use the formula and work out exactly which strength you require for each eye before you purchase your optical goggles.
3. Choose your goggles
At ProSwimwear, we stock a choice of different prescription lens goggles for you to choose from. Finding the right pair for you is a matter of personal preference. Don't forget, you can always order a few different frames, try them all on for size, and simply return the ones that you don't require for a full refund (as long as you haven’t used them in the water!).
Each goggle has its own corresponding lenses and they're not generally interchangeable, so if you buy a pair of Aqua Sphere Eagle goggles, you'll want to also purchase the Aqua Sphere Eagle lenses. Speedo's optical goggles come complete with lenses when purchased and the lenses are not interchangeable. With our Aqua Sphere and HEAD prescription goggles, you can purchase different strength lenses depending on your prescription for each eye. You can browse our prescription goggles by brands below.
Aqua Sphere Prescription Goggles & Lenses
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