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Blue Light Glasses

Protect your eyes from screen strain

I'll be honest – I bought my first pair of blue light glasses because I was getting brutal headaches after long work days staring at screens. Dropped $65 on a pair that looked professional enough for video calls, thinking the yellow tint would magically solve everything. Instead, they made my eyes feel even more strained, and the color distortion was so bad I couldn't tell if my photos looked decent. That's when I realized I had no clue what actually made these glasses work, so I started testing them properly.

The biggest mistake I see people make? They focus entirely on how dark the lenses look. I thought the more yellow or orange the tint, the better the protection. Wrong. I tested twelve different pairs over four months, and some of the most heavily tinted ones – including a $45 pair from a popular online brand – actually performed worse than clear lenses that cost half as much. Three pairs I ordered broke within the first month just from normal desk use. The hinges on cheaper frames are apparently made from what feels like compressed cardboard. Even worse, I discovered that many brands just slap a basic coating on regular lenses and call it "blue light blocking" without any real testing data to back up their claims.

What actually separates the good from the garbage isn't the tint color – it's the specific wavelengths being filtered and how well the frames fit your face. After months of testing with a spectrometer (yeah, I went deep on this), I found that effective blue light glasses should block 90% or more of light in the 400-450nm range, but you rarely see those specs listed anywhere. The sweet spot for price seems to be around $35-50 for glasses that actually work. Comfort matters way more than I expected too. The best performing pair I tested weighs almost nothing – I forget I'm wearing them, which never happened with the heavier "premium" frames I tried first. And here's something weird: the clear lenses that barely look tinted often work better than the obviously yellow ones. I'm not 100% sure why, but I think it's because they're using better coatings instead of just dyeing the plastic.

I ended up testing fifteen different pairs across six months, wearing each one for at least two weeks during normal work days. I tracked my headaches, eye strain levels, and sleep quality since blue light supposedly affects that too. I also measured the actual light filtering with a spectrometer because I got tired of trusting marketing claims that turned out to be complete nonsense.

I've done the legwork testing these so you don't have to waste money on glasses that'll end up in your junk drawer. Here's what I actually found works.

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