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I'm curious on what the author used to test his cleaning methods, because it seemed to only appears after 2 years of using this method.
My glasses are always clean. Every morning I use a single sheet of toilet paper and it does the work perfectly.
1. Get your glasses wet with warm water.
2. Apply dish soap to both lenses.
3. Gently rub the soapy water over the lenses. For some stubborn things (like sunscreen) in the edges I sometimes gently use a Q-tip.
4. Rinse under warm water. Gently rub with your fingers to agitate the soapy water and help rinse it off.
5. (This is the important step) Adjust the faucet’s flow to a low laminar flow and run the glasses through water, hitting the top of the glasses first and letting the water flow down and off the bottom of the lenses. It might take a couple passes but doing this will eliminate any water droplets on the lenses.
6. Use a clean towel to gently dry the frames. The lenses don’t need drying since the laminar flow eliminated all the water droplets on them.
I switched to contact lenses (monthlies first and then to dailies) and I do not miss any of these cleaning rituals.
Any reason you can’t use pure methanol to clean glasses? I don’t wear glasses so I don’t know the specifics, but that’s what we use to clean industrial laser lenses and any tiny speck or smudge or oil would immediately burn the protective coating. We also don’t touch the lens tissue when we clean it, rather we put methanol on the lens tissue and slide it across. Curved lenses are a bit more interesting but same metho…
Mine wind up with grease, fingerprints, dust, cooking oil, etc., so a good surfactant (i.e. dish soap) and some clean water tend to work pretty darn well.
If you want to finish 'em off with a critical-cleaning approach, go for it. The scratch/AR coatings on most glasses should be fine for both methanol and isopropanol. I would not, however, use solvents like acetone on plastic lenses of any kind; it'll probably destroy some of them.
My vision is poor (-600) but was stable for 25 years. In the last two years and especially in the last year once I got into my 50s, my vision has dropped like a rock. I need reading glasses for the first time in my life and when it’s too dark I can’t read anything. Switching between phone and tv is HARD and I can’t read properly for several minutes while my eyes adjust.
sigh What a drag it is, getting older…
A few weeks ago, one lens got bad enough that I soaked it in glass etching acid overnight and then polished it with Novus acrylic polish. In the last month I spent a lot of time outdoors with folk using sunscreen, and the other lens has gotten bad enough that I need to polish it as well.
The best method I’ve found so far: 1. Get your glasses wet with warm water. 2. Apply dish soap to both lenses. 3. Gently rub the soapy water over the lenses. For some stubborn things (like sunscreen) in the edges I sometimes gently use a Q-tip. 4. Rinse under warm water. Gently rub with your fingers to agitate the soapy water and help rinse it off. 5. (This is the important step) Adjust the faucet’s flow to a low lam…