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If you’re someone who spends a majority of their day looking at computer screens, you’ll be all too familiar with that strained feeling eyes can experience, especially if you’re in front of a laptop into the small hours.
For anyone who works with computer screens, the level of blue light exposure can cause problems with your daily routine – problems that blue light glasses can help alleviate.
With the unique range of blue light glasses available at Kanturo, here is everything you need to know about using blue light glasses when looking at computer screens.
It helps starting off to know how and why computer screens create blue light. It’s a practical and economic reason.
Everything that emits light will emit blue light to some degree. The sun. Lightbulbs. Your TV. They all have blue light present. The reason we notice it, unlike UV light, is because the light sits on a shorter wavelength - right at the start of the colour spectrum.
What does that have to do with computer screens? Well, your computer needs to work by using as little energy as possible. Shorter wavelengths use less energy, and that lends itself perfectly to a pixelated screen powered by LEDs. Computer screens (and most devices) will combine blue and white light to give you a level of light that uses as little energy as possible to show an image.
While looking at the sky won’t do you any harm, looking at a screen that is beaming a dense source of blue light in a short distance will. That’s why it helps to have a pair of blue light glasses if you spend a reasonable amount of time at a computer.
We’ve all felt it after a long time in front of a computer screen, especially if you’re up late. You’re working away with the screen brightness turned down and it still feel like there’s a strain on your eyes. Most people will see it as a sign of tiredness (which it can be) but being front and centre with a steady source of blue light can put massive strain on your eyes.
Unlike UV light, which your eye can naturally filter out to some degree, your eye cannot block blue light. The retina in the back of your eye is where all the signals come in to tell your brain what you’re looking at. A constant stream of that light from a close distance is going to make your eyes feel the pressure.
A common misconception about blue light glasses is that you’ll look like you’re wearing sunglasses. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If you look at our range of stylish blue light glasses, you’ll see that they look just like regular glasses and don’t have any significant tint or tones on the lenses.
The lenses are created with a filter that doesn’t affect how you’ll be looking around, so there’s no impediment at all. The only change will be that you’re not putting your eyes under the same level of strain when using your computer.
Yes. Laptops are no different from traditional monitors. Because laptops are much thinner as well, the LEDs rely on the concentration of blue and white light to give your screen the best picture possible while saving as much battery as they can.
You don’t have to wear blue light glasses if you spend all day working in front of a computer but having them on can help immensely to ensure you’re not going to be going home in the evening with what is referred to as ‘digital eye strain’.
Some computers may have a night mode that inverts specific colours, but the screen will still be using a mixture of blue and white light to function and will always emit blue light.
As well as getting blue light glasses, there are several small changes you can make to help relieve your eyes.
Glare is a big problem, as sunlight on a screen usually has the effect of making you turn the screen brightness up and also squint a little to block the sun. If your screen gets glare every day, it’s best to move your monitor.
Blinking helps a lot too… duh right? But did you know that while looking at a screen, our eye’s blink rate can decrease by up to 66%? Gamers will know this all too well. A bit like controlling your breathing, once you notice how little you blink when on the computer, you’ll actively find yourself wanting to blink when looking away from the screen.
You can also try to reduce the colour temperature on your computer, but it won’t reduce blue light to the same level as light blocking glasses will.
If you’re prone to watching just one more episode in bed (that quickly turns into three or five), you’ll want a pair of Kanturo glasses.
When you look at the range of blue light glasses currently in stock, you’ll see many of the designs look just like modern glasses you’d find on the high street, so you won’t be buying a pair of old-fashioned glasses.
And if you do watch a lot of media in bed, make sure you have a period of downtime afterwards. Going straight from intense blue light to complete darkness doesn’t help your body get ready for sleep. You can read more on blue light’s effect on sleep in our latest blog post here.
Shop the entire Kanturo range of blue light glasses, click here for women’s or here for men’s.
