HWN Suggests

Why Small Print Makes Us See Red

Here is a clear plea, written in legible 12-point type, from middle-aged women to package designers. Increase the size of the print on your products because our eyesight is weaker, our patience is shorter, and our brand loyalty is volatile. Give us big type or skip the hype because we’re not buying it anymore.

There are more than 40 million middle-aged women in the United States, and we’re irritated. Our buying power is estimated at $3 trillion dollars. That’s trillion with a T. We don’t care if you promise better, shinier, smoother, and more luxurious hair, we just want to decipher between shampoo and rinse without wearing eyeglasses in the shower.

I appreciate the elegant…

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Featured

 New help for that bane of middle age: blurry close-up vision

Squinting while texting? Always losing your reading glasses? An eye implant that takes about 10 minutes to put in place is the newest in a list of surgical repairs for the blurry close-up vision that is a bane of middle age. But who’s really a good candidate to toss their specs?

Articles of Interest

Could This Pair of Eyeglasses Mean the End of Bifocals?

Researchers are using tunable lenses that can instantly provide the optimal correction for different distances while taking account of your prescription.

Eye Drops To Reverse Vision Loss One Step Closer To Market

While the results sound promising, the drops do not claim to be a one-time cure for poor eyesight. They are limited to only treating presbyopia, also known as age-related farsightedness.

Smartphone Screens Correct for Your Vision Flaws

Self-correcting screens on smartphones and iPads tailor themselves to a viewer's vision—no glasses necessary.

These smart glasses automatically focus on what you’re looking at

When Carlos Mastrangelo hit his early 50s, he started suffering from a vision problem many people have as they age: he couldn’t focus up close anymore and so, his eye doctor told him, he needed to wear glasses whenever he wanted to read a book. “I kept asking myself why I am being treated with technology developed by Benjamin Franklin,” Mastrangelo wrote in an email to The Verge. “I don't live in the 18th century.”

Training Your Brain So That You Don’t Need Reading Glasses

By middle age, the lenses in your eyes harden, becoming less flexible. Your eye muscles increasingly struggle to bend them to focus on this print. But a new form of training — brain retraining, really — may delay the inevitable age-related loss of close-range visual focus so that you won’t need reading glasses. Various studies say it works, though no treatment of any kind works for everybody.

What to Do When You Can’t Read the Fine Print

EVERYTHING seems to stiffen up as people age, and our eyes are no exception. As the years go by, the lens of the eye becomes harder and less elastic. The result is a gradual worsening of the ability to focus on objects up close, called presbyopia.

Resources

Harvard Health

As we age, the lens of the eye becomes increasingly inflexible, making it harder to focus clearly on near objects. This is called presbyopia. No one knows exactly what causes the lens to become inflexible, but it happens to everyone as a natural part of aging.