Just the other day a client came into the shop complaining about little spots on his glasses. “There must be something wrong with the coating of my new lenses! Surely that shouldn’t happen. They are only new and I don’t work with chemicals!” I had a close look at the lenses and sure enough, the surface of the lenses showed small white dotts all over the front and back surface.

Occasionally we have customers come and complain about similar things where hairspray has deposited on the surface of the lens. You can be so careful, if your glasses are anywhere near where you are applying hairspray, then the lenses will show some deposit of the spray sooner or later. In many cases we can remove this deposit.

This case was different. There was no deposit on the lens surface, it looked more like something had etched not only through the anti reflective coating of the lens, but right through into the actual lens material. On further investigation it turned out that our client had been doing some cleaning in the kitchen the day before. He used a common oeven cleaner to clean his oven. Powerful stuff and absolutely fatal to many surfaces, including some painted, aluminium, plastic and many others. He used the cleaner according to instructions, but never thought about wearing safety glasses over the top of his prescription glasses. Unfortunately the mist of chemical spray deposited on the surface (back and front) of his lenses. It was so fine, that at first he didn’t even notice. Only when the chemical’s action kicked in, did it leave the etching markes. To late to wipe off and certaily too late to save his lenses from damage.

We have some of this stuff at home as well and I checked it out. I found that the manufacturer claimed it would “Clean ovens, BBQ grills and stainoless steel. It penetrates hard baked grease and grime without scrubbing or scraping. Just wipe clean every time”. Underneath was a whole list of using instructions, saftey instruction (including a warning to wear eye procection), first aid instructions and warnings how not to use it. It covered so much that it would easily have filled several pages had it been written in normal size. But – it all has to fit on the back of the can, so the size of the letters became extremely small. You’d have to have really good eyesight and a lot of time if you wanted to read it all.

So, another lesson learnt. It was an expensive one, because the lenses were basically useless and now have to be replaced.