You choose a frame in a few minutes. You look through the lenses every waking hour for the next couple of years. We fit Essilor because the difference between an average lens and a well-designed one is something you notice every single day.
Two lenses can carry the identical prescription and still feel completely different to wear. The design decides how wide your clear zone is, how quickly your eyes settle, and whether you get a headache by four in the afternoon.
Essilor is one of the few names in eyewear whose reputation rests on the optics themselves — the lens design, the coatings and the material are engineered as one system rather than assembled from parts.
The progressive and myopia-control designs come out of years of clinical trials — not marketing. Where there's evidence, we'll show it to you.
A great lens fitted badly is a bad lens. We measure to your eyes and your chosen frame, then cut most single-vision jobs in our own on-site lab.
You won't need all of these. The right combination depends on your prescription, your age, and what you actually do all day.
Once your arms stop being long enough for a menu, you need more than one focal length — distance for the road, intermediate for a screen, near for reading. Varilux puts all three into one lens with no visible line and no jump between zones.
The top tier, the Varilux XR series, was designed using behavioural data about how eyes actually move — so vision stays sharp even when you flick quickly between your phone, your laptop and the road ahead.
A single-vision lens built for the way we actually use our eyes now — which is to say, staring at something roughly an arm's length away for most of the day.
It carries your prescription like any single-vision lens, with a small amount of extra support built in for close and intermediate work. If you finish the day with tired, achy eyes after hours on a screen, this is the design worth asking about.
Short-sightedness in children doesn't just sit still — it tends to get worse year after year, and every extra dioptre raises the lifelong risk of serious eye problems later. Ordinary lenses correct it. Stellest is designed to slow it down.
The centre of the lens is a normal clear zone for sharp distance vision. Around it sit over a thousand tiny, invisible lenslets that create a signal in front of the retina which slows the eye's growth.
average reduction in myopia progression compared with single-vision lenses, in children who wore them at least 12 hours a day, across a two-year randomised controlled trial.
Clear indoors, darkening automatically as you step into sunlight, then fading back again. One pair covers both jobs, which means no swapping between glasses and prescription sunglasses.
They also block 100% of UV all the time, whether they've darkened or not — which matters, because UV exposure is cumulative and does its damage quietly over decades.
Not a lens in itself — a coating that goes onto one. Crizal is the part that stops reflections bouncing off the front of your lenses at night, keeps them clearer for longer, and shields your eyes from UV reflected off the back surface.
The range covers everyday anti-glare through to Crizal Sapphire HR for maximum clarity and durability, and Crizal Prevencia, which selectively filters blue-violet light and carries a subtle violet reflection.
Essilor®, Varilux®, Eyezen®, Stellest®, Crizal® and Transitions® are trademarks of their respective owners. Clinical figures describe study populations and are not a guarantee of individual results — Stellest outcomes in particular depend on consistent daily wear. Your optometrist will tell you honestly which designs are worth it for your prescription, and which aren't.
Book an exam and we'll match the design, material and coating to your prescription and the way you actually spend your day.
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