How to Clean Your Eyeglasses!

It’s taken me 60 years to figure out how to clean my prescription eyeglasses without scratching the increasingly fragile, scratchable lenses that seem to invite a progressive infiltration of vision upending damage characterized by a progressive erosion and distortion of ones excessively priced prescription lenses without meaningful recourse.  How about this for a run-on sentence!!!

Using microfiber cloths to clean with or without some commercial concoction of water and isopropyl alcohol misses the point as much as using your t-shirt, towel, or any other garment available at the moment to wipe the current smudge clean.  A little scratch appears which invites you to rub harder to no avail other than to continue to aggravate and perpetuate the failure of the last cleaning while deepening the scratches and smudges.

The problem is that any residue, any dust, face or hair lotion, or foreign microparticles of unknown origin that reside on your lenses may serve as a nidus of injury when rubbed firmly, even if performed by a clean microfiber cloth.  Microfiber has all sorts of attributes that presumably make it ideal for cleaning glasses but, even when I wash the microfiber clothes and rotate a stack of 20 of them each day to clean my lenses, scratches appear and progress over time.  Over the last 3 years I have had to replace my favorite glasses twice after they have become so scratched up that my already failing vision seemed even worse when they were perched on the bridge of my nose.  Microfiber may indeed forestall the progression to some extent, but it has no magical attributes to completely prevent the process of deterioration.

What we are told to do and what makes common sense may be two different things.  With my new pair of lenses just purchased, my goal is to totally avoid any wiping of my lenses during the cleaning process. How do I do that?

I wash the glasses in any sink and after a thorough rinsing of any prevailing residue and discrete particulate matter, I use a gentle soap to coat the lenses while continuing the running water routine.  Naturally my hands have been washed prior to this procedure and I avoid using any rough spots on my fingers to do the rubbing.  This only takes a few seconds.  Then I rinse the soapy water off of the lenses, dry my hands and then instead of wiping my glasses, I resort to a WOLFBOX MF50 Electric Air Duster-110000RPM Super Power Cordless Air Duster, 3-Gear Adjustable Mini Blower to blow the water beads and other micro residue particles off of the lenses. This takes about 5 seconds and does a marvelous job.  

So far, NO scratches!!! It’s been about a month since starting this routine. Only time will tell whether this approach weathers the test of time.  If it doesn’t, I’m not likely to confess this in a future blog.  On the other hand, I feel quite certain that if I can keep to this routine, I will be happily rewarded.  To this extent, it is notable that I have just purchased a second mini blower for travel purposes so that I can continue my routine whether by land, by sea, or up somewhere 30,000 above our planet.