How to maintain and clean your reading glasses?

Maintaining and cleaning your reading glasses is essential to extend their lifespan.

Whether you read for fun or for professional necessity, reading glasses provide greater comfort during everyday reading. However, it is sometimes difficult to preserve their condition and their cleaning and maintenance are often neglected. At home or at the optician , find out how to maintain and clean your reading glasses to extend their lifespan.

Our maintenance advice

Reading glasses accompany us everywhere and in every moment of everyday life. However, over the course of the day, they can become dirty and damaged. To preserve them, it is essential to adopt good maintenance and cleaning habits.

If you haven't already, we've prepared a guide for you to find the best places to buy reading glasses .

Always store them in their case

This advice seems logical and yet we tend to put our reading glasses everywhere. Although most lenses these days come with an anti-scratch treatment, you are not safe from a scratch.

A very common bad habit is placing your glasses on your head or hanging them on your shirt collar. Although this may seem convenient, it presents a significant risk of loss or fall. Glasses can easily become loose and fall if the collar is shaken or you lean forward. Additionally, rubbing against clothing fibers or shirt buttons can also lead to scratches or damage to the lenses and frames of your reading glasses.

To prevent any risk of falling or breakage, be sure to store them in their case when you have finished using them. Prefer a rigid case, much more resistant to shocks than the soft case, it will better protect your glasses.

Don't leave them in the sand

Do you want to read your book on the beach this summer? Avoid leaving your reading glasses in the sand after you finish reading. Indeed, grains of sand, even the smallest ones, can get stuck in the corners of the glasses and damage the lenses, or even scratch them. In addition to the risk of scratches, grains of sand can also cause premature wear of the hinges and screws of the glasses.

Avoid contact with heat

Under a beautiful summer sun or in winter in front of a fireplace, reading is a pleasant activity in all seasons. But to preserve the condition of your reading glasses, avoid exposing them to heat.

When exposed to high temperatures for an extended period of time, the heat can cause the frame to deform, affecting the fit of the glasses on your face.

Additionally, lenses can crack or break from heat, especially if they are made of plastic. Treatments applied to lenses, such as anti-reflective or anti-scratch treatment, can also deteriorate under the effect of heat, which can affect the quality of vision and the lifespan of the glasses.

To take care of your reading glasses, store them away from heat, in a cool, dry place.

Remove and put on your glasses with both hands

When wanting to remove our reading glasses quickly, it is tempting to do it with one hand. However, removing your glasses this way risks bending and deforming them. Indeed, the pressure exerted on only one side can twist the frame, weaken it, or even break it.

Removing and putting on your glasses with both hands helps distribute pressure across the entire frame and preserves their condition and lifespan. So, remember to hold the frame on both sides, with your thumbs on the upper part and the other fingers on the lower part for smooth removal.

Our cleaning tips

Worn daily, reading glasses are exposed to a lot of dirt such as dust, sebum and even fingerprints. All these little impurities can disrupt your visual comfort when reading. To get rid of them while preserving the quality of your glasses, here are our cleaning tips.

Always use a suitable cloth

When cleaning your glasses, it is important not to use any cloth or tissue that could scratch the lenses and frame. It is recommended to use a soft, clean chamois cloth, specially designed for cleaning glasses. Avoid using toilet paper, tissues or paper towels, which can contain abrasive particles and damage your lenses. Keep your cleaning cloth with you to clean your glasses at any time.

And if your chamois is dirty, just put it in the washing machine and that's it!

Use suitable products

To clean your reading glasses, there is a wide variety of suitable optical cleaning products. These products are specially designed not to damage lenses and optical treatments, such as anti-reflective or anti-scratch treatments.

Avoid using household cleaners, window sprays, alcohol or abrasive products to clean your glasses, as this may damage the frame or lenses.

Be careful not to trust all the tips you can find on the internet. Based on baking soda or white vinegar, these methods may seem effective, but risk damaging the glasses in the long term.

To ensure a long life for your reading glasses and preserve their optical quality, use cleaning sprays specially designed for glasses or gentle, alcohol-free cleaning wipes.

For stubborn stains, opt for ultrasonic cleaning at the optician

If, despite all your cleaning attempts, you find that your glasses are not completely clean, do not hesitate to call your optician.

The latter will be able to carry out ultrasonic cleaning to dislodge all the impurities stuck to the lenses without damaging the glasses frame. Ultrasonic cleaning allows you to clean all the corners and small cavities of the glasses that are difficult to reach when cleaning by hand. This way allows glasses to be cleaned in depth without altering the optical treatments of the lenses, the frame and the coating of the glasses.