You may have heard the term “blue light” in relation to digital device use, such as your cell phone or laptop. Blue light blocking glasses are becoming extremely popular as the usage of digital devices continues to increase, due to claims they can protect your eyes. But do they really work? Here, we take a closer look at the impact:
What Is Blue Light?
To understand blue light, you first need to understand what sunlight is made up of. Sunlight contains a number of different types of colored light, including the colors of the rainbow. Each of these colored lights has a different wavelength and energy level and when combined they’re called “white light”, or sunlight.
Blue light is one of these strands of the light spectrum, and is defined as having a short wavelength and high energy levels. Whilst we’ve always been exposed to blue light from the sun, the usage of cell phones, laptops, computers and tablets has increased exposure exponentially and for both a much longer period of time, and at a closer range than sunlight exposure.
What Does Blue Light Do To Your Eyes?
As blue light has a short wavelength, it’s easy to penetrate your eyes; meaning that almost all visible blue light rays will pass through your cornea and lens to the retina. It’s believed that too much blue light exposure can lead to the potential damage of light-sensitive cells in the retina, with one study finding it could cause phototoxic retinal damage. With that said, the exposure to blue light would need to be excessive, over a long period of time to have an impact.
What Are Blue Light Glasses?
Blue light glasses, or blue light blockers as they’re also called, use special lens to reduce the amount of blue light that reaches your eye. The lens filters blue light rays and counterbalances them with a slight yellow tint, to reduce the amount of blue light that reaches your eyes. You’ll notice that our blue light smart glasses have a slight yellow tint on the lens for this exact reason.
Do Blue Light Glasses Help With Eye Strain?
According to the American Optometric Association, 58% of Americans suffer from digital eye strain (DES), primarily from their laptop and desktop computers, but also from cellphones and tablets.
Whilst there’s many things that can cause eye strain such as dry eyes, there’s no research that proves blue light causes this. What a number of studies have found however is that blue light blocking glasses have helped people to sleep better, therefore having improved work performance the following day.
Do Blue Light Glasses Help You Sleep Better?
Studies have found that exposure to too much blue light at night suppresses the secretion of melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep cycles. This is because blue light stimulates parts of the brain that make us feel alert, the opposite of what we want our body to be when trying to fall to sleep.
Using blue light glasses when scrolling your cell phone late at night can help to reduce the melatonin suppression and reduce the alertness; causing minimal impact to your sleep cycle.
Whilst blue light glasses won’t make you sleepy, they can minimize the impact of your devices on your sleep cycle.
Do You Need Blue Light Glasses?
There’s no negative impact to wearing blue light glasses when working or using your electronic devices. Plus with your Lucyd blue light glasses they remove the need for additional headphones and allow you to utilise the smart features. Blue light glasses won’t improve your eyesight, but they may make your working day and sleep cycle that little bit better.
