Expert view on lens scratches
Scratched lenses are probably among the most common causes of owners' problems with expensive designer sunglasses. Even the slightest blemish can spoil the frames' look and ruin the sunglasses wearing experience. Owners often make two common mistakes when faced with scratches or blemishes sunglasses lens on their favourite shades.
One is to throw the spectacles in the bin, even expensive designer frames, and buy a new pair; the other is to try and repair the lens themselves. A quick search on the internet will throw up plenty of sites that offer advice and self-help remedies for improving scratched lenses. The long experience of expert technicians at AlphaOmega is that trying to rid your lens of a scratch will only worsen matters.
Let the experts take a look
By all means, try if you must (and we offer some essential tips on this later on), but our advice is to let AlphaOmega experts take a look first. Sunglasses lenses are typically manufactured from glass or a plastic acetate compound. If the lens is made of glass, the scratch is almost impossible to remove. Glass is much more resistant to scratches in the first place, so if it does get marked, the scratch will almost certainly be too deep for any decent repair. And any attempt to remove it will require grinding away at the glass itself, resulting in a thinner lens and a distorted image.
Coatings can be problematic
The only hope here is that your sunglasses lens has been given a scratch-resistant coating, and it is this that has suffered the damage. Rubbing the lens gently with a microfibre cloth soaked in lens cleaning solution may do the trick, but don't hold your breath. Lenses made of plastic compounds are much more prone to scratching, although modern blends have made them much more damage-resistant than they once were. If the lenses are polarised, you will need a specialist extra-fine abrasive solution to do the job. However, the chances of ruining the polarising properties are high.
Amateurs can make things worse
Amateur remedies for cleaning shallow scratches on non-polarised lenses include using a lens cleaning kit, furniture polish, brass polish, toothpaste, baking powder, petroleum jelly and car wax.
Your chances of repairing anything other than hairline scratches with amateur cleaning are small. The chances of ruining the lenses are high, especially those with a special coating. At best, you will probably get sunglasses with lenses of two 'shades', a different one for each eye.
Replacing lenses can be cheaper
In all but the rarest instances, the solution at AlphaOmega is to replace the lenses completely. An AlphaOmega repair may not be as expensive as you think. We can source custom-made lenses of the highest quality to fit virtually any frame. Our customers will not have to pay designer prices to have them fitted. The new lenses will also be a perfect match.
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