In general, if you are currently working in a field where laser safety is important, you definitely need to put some time into selecting safety glasses that will provide you with the protection you need. Here are some common ways people incorrectly choose glasses including what you can do to make sure your glasses fit you properly and offer the shielding from possible laser eye damage that you require.

Forgetting Prescription Lenses

Buying glasses before thinking about your prescription is something people can do but something that you should be careful about. It’s often easy to miss, you might think that you can just put laser safety glasses over your regular glasses, but this may not always be the case. What you want to look out for is either prescription glasses matching what you’re wearing now, or even something called lined bifocal laser glasses.This is going to be especially relevant if you need to do a lot of reading while you work at your job where laser protection is necessary, but you want to have more regular vision the rest of the time. These types of glasses do exist but you need to look for them specifically. They may not be available on every carrier.

Being Too Careless with Frames

The frame style is going to matter. For example, if you need the glasses for heavy-duty laser protection, you’ll want to make sure that you go for the wrap-around style for frames. If you need the glasses for minor laser protection but also need more flexibility, then you might want to go with a lightweight frame design. An example of when this might help is where you need peripheral visions, such as for operating a vehicle. Some wrap-around styles may make using your peripheral vision harder, depending.

Missing the Wavelength

Lasers come in different wavelengths, so if you get glasses that don’t match up with the right wavelength for the laser at your job, then this could be a major problem. It’s also worth noting that there’s a feature called optical density that you have to worry about as well. If the laser is strong enough to be visible to the naked eye, you’ll need optical density options in your laser glasses in order to make sure that you’re covered here. Sometimes visible lasers are necessary in order to help align equipment, for example. In this case, they may need to let in certain parts of the lasers just so you can perform your job while blocking out the most dangerous wavelengths.Other times they may be used for visualization or other similar purposes. Either way, you want the right glasses for the job, and this requires some research to see what’s used at your work before you buy the glasses so you don’t have to go back and get new ones.It’s actually possible to have a machine that uses more than one wavelength or multiple lasers at different wavelengths from different machines. This is why you need to make sure you have the right filter because any time you have a missing filter to the specification you need you may be taking a risk with your eyes.The key is to make sure that the visible light you need to see makes it through without allowing laser radiation in.

Missing the Dyes or Other Parts of Operation

It helps to have an understanding of how laser protective glasses work in order to make sure that the kind you’re getting are the ones that you need. Your work should prescribe them and give you a sense of what you need by themselves, of course, but you can’t always count on that. Generally, these glasses work by using dyes and other chemicals in order to absorb or reflect laser light of a particular wavelength. That way, the light that might damage your eye will never reach there, but you will be able to still see normally with regular visible light and won’t be stumbling around in the dark due to impaired vision.In other words, you get the best of both worlds in this way and for this particular reason.

Ignoring Brand

Brand actually matters when you’re picking laser protective glasses because the cheaper ones may not do the job properly. Laser safety is not exactly an area where you want to skimp in any way at all. So, if you don’t recognize the brand of the glasses at all, you may want to move on to glasses with a brand that you do recognize and that has a reputation for quality. Try to avoid just picking the first ones you see at the store when you go to pick up the glasses or the first entry that comes up when you search for it on Google without actually reading the brand first.People who miss this step and make this mistake will likely come to regret it later on since laser damage to your eyes can be progressive and it may not be completely obvious at first.For more information, please make sure you go ahead and contact us today if you have any questions about safety glasses of just about any type so we can guide you in the right direction. This includes especially laser safety glasses and glasses that help block out other types of radiation. These choices could impact your overall health, after all.