In a study of studies, researchers concluded that eyeglasses that block blue light might not deliver on claims made by advertisers or optometrist offices. They caution consumers to think twice about shelling out the extra cash for the specs.
“The amount of blue light our eyes receive from artificial sources, such as computer screens, is about a thousandth of what we get from natural daylight," he said. "It’s also worth bearing in mind that blue-light filtering lenses typically filter out about 10-25% of blue light, depending on the specific product. Filtering out higher levels of blue light would require the lenses to have an obvious amber tint, which would have a substantial effect on color perception.”
I’m sceptical that blue light lenses, even those that effectively block blue light, are doing much of anything. Blue light can mess with your circadian rhythm, but so can orange-tinted light if it’s bright enough. A better system would be to limit screen time after dark. If you are using screens, lower their brightness to the lowest amount you can still see. You can use a night -time filter to tint the screen orange after dark (most OS’s and devices support some form of this). Blue light lenses while holding a OLED device six inches from your face at full intensity? Likely not doing much.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I read that your circadian rhythm is really set by basically the brightest light you see regularly. And just outside is orders of magnitude brighter than any screen you’d look at. So, as long as you anchor yourself to sunlight the rest is all quite negligible.
I’ve got lenses that supposedly block UV and blue light, and they’ve been great, because they somehow block the spectrum of light that triggers migraines in me. They’ve got a slight amber tint to them, and I’m ok seeing the world in slight sepia tones since it means only getting migraines once or twice a year instead of once or twice a month.
I just use a screen filter on my desktop and phone about 2hrs before sleep and it makes a tremendous difference. I don’t know of the alleged benefits outside of sleep, but I do know it clearly helps with that.
Do you regularly spend time outside during the day? I read that doing that will basically negate any need for managing screens like this.
Oh great, a week after I ordered my new glasses with a filter.
This has been discussed at length for years, this is a “review”, which means they just looked at older studies and compiled the information together. But each of those older studies had conclusions of their own.
If you ever question stuff like this, go check out google scholar and read some abstracts and conclusions, hell some papers even have a really solid background section that can fill an average Joe in enough to decently understand the whole paper.
Thanks, Google scholar is a good idea. My issue was I didn’t know about the discussion yet, I just trusted the guy seeking the glasses. Oh well, next time I’ll be slightly smarter.