The other day, I wrote the post about the 10 things I always pack, which includes my prescription polarised sunglasses and now I’m going to expand on that with all the other prescription eyewear that exists that I didn’t know about until my 20s or 30s.
About a year and a half ago, a post went round Twitter about glasses being completely normalised disability aids. I read it, bookmarked it, lost the bookmark and thought about it a lot. No, like most glasses-wearers, I’d never seriously considered my eyesight a disability, despite having known – or at least believed – that it ruled me out of certain jobs, like being a pilot or an astronaut. Nah, society has decided there’s a certain level of blurriness at which you should apply correction, be it glasses, contacts or laser surgery, and that’s all there is to it.
But when you think about it, I have a surprising amount of difficulty navigating the world without corrective lenses. I can’t see particularly clearly more than about two feet in front of me, especially in lower lighting. I probably couldn’t watch a film. I probably couldn’t get through an airport on my own. And of course, I couldn’t drive. That’s where the law, rather than society, mandates vision correction. I have a code on my driving licence saying so. But I’d never really thought about until the summer of 2025 when I accidentally dropped a wet sandy swimsuit into a drybag on top of my glasses. Fine until the sun went down and I wanted to take off my sunglasses. Fine until… oh, I need to drive home. I live fairly rurally. A taxi isn’t an easy option and public transport, especially at gone 11pm, is non- existent. For ten minutes I faced the very ugly choice of driving home in the dark with no glasses at all vs driving home in the dark with sunglasses before I remembered that when I got my new glasses, I put my old ones in the car for emergencies.
So now I have a newfound appreciation for both what my glasses are doing for me and for the range of prescription eyewear I didn’t even know existed until I was an adult (and I’ve been wearing glasses since I was three years old, so that’s a long time to discover that there are options out there.
Sunglasses
Yep, obviously. I have a somewhat vampiric relationship with sunlight so I only leave the house without my prescription sunglasses if it’s actually night. I had “prescription sunglasses” as a teenager but they were just ordinary glasses with a brown tint. They had zero ability to block sun, UV light or glare, they just turned the world vaguely brown. Then, living in Switzerland as a student, I discovered that snow causes glare and I bought my first polarised sunglasses. Revelation!! Oh, it was life-changing. Then I discovered you could get polarised sunglasses with a prescription! Up until earlier this year, I got them from the depths of fishing websites but now you can get them from Specsavers! So much easier!
Swimming goggles
I was first chucked in a pool when I was about three months old and swimming is still my primary form of summer exercise. Imagine what my life could have been if I’d had any idea that you can get goggles that allow you to see the far end of the pool! Prescription swimming goggles aren’t quite as precise as real prescription glasses – they’re like the cheap reading glasses you buy at the petrol station, rounded up the nearest whole number – but they make such a difference! If you have a simple prescription with matching eyes, you might be able to just buy a pair at your local pool but if, like a lot of people, your eyes are different, you’ll probably have to buy online and then make sure you’re not putting them on upside down so each cup goes on the wrong eye.
Ski goggles
OK, there’s an excellent reason why I didn’t discover this until I was an adult and that’s because I neither skiied nor snowboarded as a child. Strictly speaking, you can’t get prescription ski goggles. The lens is too big and curved for a prescription. But you can get goggles made specifically to fit over your glasses. In fact, quite a lot of ski goggles fit over glasses. If you find that makes your glasses steam up, you can get prescription inserts that slot into some kinds of goggles. Not all of them but they’re removable, so if you’ve got the right goggles, you can swap them in and out. They’re not even massively expensive.
Safety glasses
You’re less likely to want these on your travels but I’m going to throw them in anyway. My dad was a development chemist, which is CV-speak for “got paid to be a mad scientist” – he had it all: the curly hair, the white coat, the mysterious stained fingers (as a child, I believed dabbling in palladium turned your fingers yellow; as an adult I can’t believe you put your bare hands in the chemistry!), the little vials absently pocketed, the ability to answer all the science questions on University Challenge, the inability to do simple everyday things like find his phone or close cupboard doors, and the multiple glasses! When you work in a lab, there are certain safety protocols to follow (which I’d have thought included not putting your hands in the stuff), like the wearing of safety glasses or goggles for some tasks and it turns out these come in prescription variants too.
Visual stress glasses
Back in 2010 or 2011, I got tested for Irlen Syndrome / scotopic sensitivity / visual stress (see vampire comment above and the fact that I can’t even look at dark mode, let alone read it), which means that an optician in Bournemouth got me to read things out with different coloured overlays and I did indeed read so much more quickly and smoothly with a magenta overlay (which turns out to not be an official Irlen colour but at least makes me feel a little less scammed). I’d been sceptical but I could feel and hear it even as I was doing it. Must get those overlays out again. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been doing so well at getting through books in 2026. Anyway, as well as the plastic sheets for reading, you can get glasses made with your colour (your glasses colour is probably different from your overlay colour) and those, obviously, can be prescription as well as plain. I don’t have the glasses. I forget for years on end that I even have the overlays.
There are lots of other glasses but you start to get into the realm of really quite specialised. I haven’t entirely figured out what pickleball even is but apparently you can get special glasses for them. I have a pair of yellow glasses for driving at night but hadn’t taken into account that I have to wear them over my normal ones and they don’t fit. Cycling glasses. Colour-correcting glasses for forms of colourblindness. All kinds. And the chances are, they come with a prescription variant these days; you don’t have to put up with plain glass to get the other benefits. Ask Google, ask your optician, find out if there’s a way you can actually see through the glasses you’re wearing.