Blue Light Awareness

What is blue light?

Some blue light has a shorter wavelength than other colors of light, which means that it puts more strain on our eyes. It also reaches deeper into the eye, which slowly kills the cells in our retina. Not all types of blue light are bad for our eyes, but the kind that is emitted by LED lights of any kind (including all electronic screens as well as LED lightbulbs) is particularly harmful. The human eye is not very good at blocking this kind of light either, which means that there’s not really anything we can do naturally to stop the damaging effects of our electronic screens.

Why Screen Time is Hurting Your Health

All the screens we look at throughout the day emit blue light. While our bodies need some blue light to regulate our wake and sleep cycles, prolonged exposure to blue light emitted from electronic devices has the power to disrupt your sleep, produce symptoms of eye strain, and eventually cause permanent damage to your vision. Yikes. However, there is a solution. Wearing blue light glasses can decrease how much blue light your eyes are exposed to on daily basis and therefore help mitigate the negative effects of blue light on your health.

"You spend around 3,500 hours looking at screens."

Blue Light Filters And Protective Eyewear

If you are using your phone constantly — especially if you use it primarily for texting, e-mailing and web browsing — a convenient way to reduce your blue light exposure is to use a blue light filter or glasses. Digital electronic devices emit blue light that can cause eye strain and may lead to eye problems over time. As mentioned above, anti-blue light glasses also can be helpful to reduce blue light exposure from computers and other digital devices.

These special-purpose glasses are available without an eyeglass prescription if you have no need for vision correction or if you routinely wear contact lenses to correct your eyesight. Or they can be specially prescribed to optimize your vision specifically for the distance from which you view your devices. If you have presbyopia and routinely wear progressive lenses or bifocals, prescription computer glasses with single vision lenses give you the additional benefit of a much larger field of view for seeing your entire computer screen clearly. (Keep in mind, though, that this type of computer eyewear is exclusively for seeing objects within arm's length and cannot be worn for driving or other distance vision needs.) Also, a number of lens manufacturers have introduced special glare-reducing anti-reflective coatings that also block blue light from both natural sunlight and digital devices.