Wednesday 20 April 2011

I hate choosing new glasses.

I've been wearing glasses since I was 8, and every time I have to choose a new pair the process never gets any easier. When I first started wearing them I had to get a new pair every 6 months because my sight went downhill so quickly, then every year as the decrease settled down, and now I'm up to a new pair every 2 years.

Looking back on it now, my first few pairs of glasses had huge, circular frames and were quite hideous, but I remember thinking I was so cool when I came home with my very first pair and I couldn't wait to put them on and watch TV (and actually be able to see the screen without squinting!). Gradually my taste got better and the frames became less round and more rectangular, until they became rather boring and plain black. Even then, I still had trouble choosing a pair I liked the shape of, let alone the colour (which is probably why I just played it safe with the plain black...).

If you've never worn glasses, it probably seems really simple to choose frames. But there's loads of little things you don't really realise, like are they the right width for my face? Are the lenses the right shape for my face and my eyes? Do my eyes sit in the middle of the lens or are they too far towards the top? Do the frames sit comfortably on my nose? Do I look like a complete dork in them?
... I could go on, but this is the reason why I hate picking glasses, because it's so hard to find a pair that are just right.
Or maybe I'm just way too fussy...

For my last pair, I was persuaded by one of the lovely ladies working in the opticians to go for something completely different - lilac frames with thick purple plastic legs. I was unsure about them at first, but they really grew on me and I really liked them and the fact that they were different and made my 'face ornaments' a little bit more exciting.

But this time when I came to pick new frames, I found nothing I 100% loved. It's not a decision I want to take lightly, as my glasses are up to costing about £250 now (compared to free when I was still at school...) and I have to live with them on my face every day for 2 years. I found a couple of pairs that I felt meh about, but nothing that really grabbed me. My mum had one pair that she really, really liked, but I wasn't sure because they felt too wide for my face. Not having lenses for your prescription in the frames means that you can't look at yourself wearing them from a distance, so you if you're as short-sighted as me you have to have your face basically touching a mirror to be able to see them clearly, and that doesn't give a very good picture at all. Anyway, my mum kept saying how much she liked these frames so to stop us spending the rest of the afternoon in the shop I went with them.

Here's the ones I went for in the end. Sorry about the rubbish photo, it's really bright outside and I'm missing the cable for my camera so had to take this on my laptop webcam.
Opinions?
I've had them for 4 days now and I'm still not sure if I like them or not - one moment I do, and then the next moment I think "These are far too wide for my face, I look more than a little bit stupid...". Hopefully they'll grow on me, but if not my prescription isn't that much different from in my previous pair so I'll just switch back to those :P



It also shocked me slightly when the optician said "So, are you at uni now? What are you studying?", and I realised that even though it feels like 5 minutes since I sat in that chair and read the letters off the chart it had actually been two full years. I literally don't know where the time has gone because it seems to have just flown by, but loads has happened and I've changed so much.
In the next two years I will have graduated, and either just be finishing a Masters or be (only possibly) finishing my first year of full-time employment. Scary stuff!