I have perfect vision, and yet I wear these computer glasses every day — here’s why
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JINSI'm a very lucky person. Even after decades of subjecting my eyes to TV, computer screens, phones, tablets, and handheld game consoles, I still have 20/20 vision.
What I have had, though, is a very strange sleeping pattern. In high school, college, and beyond, I would routinely stay up, sleepless, until all hours of the night. That's a common story for people who love gadgets, and some attribute it to "blue light."
In a nutshell, blue light is the part of the light spectrum that gets deepest into your eye. Being exposed to it tells your brain, "Hey, you should be up." Before electricity, humans would get most of their blue light from the sun. Get up when the sun was up, get drowsy when the sun went down, and repeat.
There's no hard proof that lowering the amount of blue light you take in can help you sleep better, or cure insomnia, but there is a lot of debate about it. So, before I started working for Business Insider, a job I knew would require me to stare at a screen for a majority of my day, I bought a pair of computer glasses from JINS.
JINS' "Screen" line of glasses have slightly tinted lenses that cut a little over a third of the blue light from screens from hitting your eyes.
As a non-glasses wearer, I was wary about how much I would actually like wearing glasses. Would they be comfortable? Would they look ok? Would they fit? JINS is a one-size-fits-all kind of operation. It turns out they're comfortable enough that I don't realize they're on my face, and I've gotten complements on how they look. While not the most high-end or fashionable of computer glasses, they have a contemporary look. No one around you will think you're wearing blue light-reduction glasses or special glasses, they look just like a normal pair.
Now, do they work? In my experience, yes.
Over the past few months, I've taken a number of steps to reduce my blue light intake: Installing F.lux on my MacBook Pro and enabling Night Shift on my iPhone and iPad. But the screen I'm staring at most often, my office monitor, has no blue light reduction at all. I'm looking at it for roughly ten and a half hours every day, so it's by far my greatest source of blue light.
The other big benefit of blue light reduction is less eye strain. Even though I look at a screen all day, my eyes don't feel irritated at the end of it. I've done some comparisons of how my eyes feel when looking at a screen with and without the glasses, and there's a definite difference; I feel the screen's glow a lot more when the glasses are off.
If you find your eyes hurt at the end of the day and your job involves looking at a computer for a while, a pair of JINS could really make a difference. They're comfortable, look good, and have definitely improved my work day and sleep schedule.