Your Child and Myopia (short-sightedness)

Myopia or short-sightedness is very common and causes objects in the distance to appear blurred. Glasses are usually prescribed to bring distant objects into focus.

Myopia does not mean the eyes are unhealthy. A child is more likely to be myopic if their parents are and it has been shown that increased time spent indoors on near concentrated tasks like reading or on digital devices can worsen the myopia.

As myopia worsens the prescription needed to correct it will become stronger.

To help avoid worsening myopia there are a number of things you can encourage as a parent.

· Spend some time each day outside in natural daylight.

· Avoid spending long periods of time viewing near tasks including reading books and digital devices. Build in regular breaks from focusing at near so that the eyes can rest from focussing at near by looking out of the window or across the room.

Conventional glasses or contact lenses give your child clear vision but now with myopia management we can slow down how quickly their myopia develops overtime.

One of the causes of myopia is the eye being too long. The technology behind myopia management works to reduce excessive lengthening of the eye and is available in spectacle lenses and contact lenses.

Reducing a child’s myopia progression can achieve a potentially lower adult prescription meaning thinner and lighter spectacle lenses and less blurry vision without spectacles or contact lenses.

Please call us to book an appointment to discuss how myopia management might be suitable for your child.

Maui Jim – Sunglasses For All Seasons

“Our sunglasses won’t change the world – they’ll change the way you see it!”

With an abundance of styles and colours Maui Jim’s patented lens technologies give the wearer vivid performance and clear clarity.

When fisherman Jim Richards began selling his sunglasses on the beaches of Maui, Hawaii in 1980 he was so confident of his product that fishermen and boating enthusiasts would return to him time after time. He became the original “Maui Jim”.

Recommended by the Skin Cancer Foundation, Maui Jim sunglasses are available in non-prescription, single vision, varifocals and readers.

Let colours shine!

Get in touch to view our Maui Jim Collection

01908 567 672

How To Recycle Your Old Contact Lenses

By Maria Wilson FBDO CL

Find yourself throwing away worn contact lenses and the packaging? Now you can recycle them at Stony Optical with our contact lens recycle scheme, while also helping to support Willen Hospice.

With over 780 million plastic lenses going into landfill each year – or even worse, being flushed away and ending up in our oceans – at Stony Optical, we wanted to ensure we provided a sustainable service for recycling your contact lenses with ease.

We were thrilled to discover that we can recycle all soft contact lenses including all of their packaging waste.

Over recent years many people have been concerned about the number of lenses, and in particular soft daily disposable contact lenses, that are being thrown away. Because of this, our awareness of the importance of disposing single use plastic is ever increasing. When researching the current guidelines for recycling, it quickly became apparent how it differed from each council as to what parts they would accept. With no council accepting 100% of the waste, we are delighted to say that we have partnered with TerraCycle to accept all of your contact lens waste here at Stony Optical.

TerraCycle and ACUVUE have partnered to create a free recycling program for any brand of soft contact lenses and blister packs.

What to do?

All you need to do is save the empty blister packs of any brand of contacts, both the plastic base and the foil top. Collect them in a container along with the used contact lenses and pop them into Stony Optical whenever suits you – there's no need to be one of our customers, this is a recycling program for everyone. Once we have collected 10kg of contact lenses and their packaging we send everything to TerraCycle. We have been amazed at how quickly we collect 10kg and we can see the impact that not recycling lenses would have on our landfill.

TerraCycle are taking care of the hard part. They are recycling the lenses and packaging to produce garden fencing and furniture among other things.

An additional bonus is that we earn points for each package we send to TerraCycle. These points are exchanged for a charity donation and at Stony Optical we have opted for Willen Hospice to receive our donations.

So start collecting all your contact lens waste, bring it all to us in Stony Optical and support Willen Hospice at the same time