Do you find the headlights on new cars more difficult to look at? Well you are not alone and, most importantly, it's not all in your head. A new article by CBC confirms that the new headlights are in fact getting brighter, smaller, and more on the blue spectrum.
Older style headlights would use warmer halogen lights. The new headlights are almost always LED based which cast a more concentrated bluer light. Blue light can create more glare because of its high energy and short wavelength, which causes it to scatter more widely in the eye.
Fun Fact: The atmosphere is made up of gases like nitrogen and oxygen, which are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. When sunlight passes through the atmosphere, the air molecules scatter the light in all directions. Blue and violet light have the shortest wavelengths and are scattered the most, so more blue light reaches our eyes.
So what can we do about it? Well until Canada creates better and more updated regulations to control for glare created by headlights (in fact, current regulations do not even mention the word glare at all!), there are some things you can do to protect yourself in the meantime.
First, an annual eye exam is important to help detect and control for common causes of glare, particularly at night, such as astigmatism/refractive error, dry eyes and cataracts to name a few.
Additionally, specific anti-reflective coatings or selective blue filters can be embedded in lens materials to help block the most noxious high energy blue wavelengths of light while still allowing plenty of light to reach the retina. Now we are not talking about those 'As Seen On TV' yellow tinted "night driving glasses". Yellow-tinted glasses can improve contrast in specific daylight situations by filtering out some of the sun’s blue light. However, they also limit the amount of light entering the eye, further decreasing visibility in low-light conditions. By the age of 60, individuals generally require three times more light to see than when they were 20. Several independent studies have concluded no positive benefit to yellow tinted glasses including this one published in JAMA Ophthalmology - Comparison of Pedestrian Detection With and Without Yellow-Lens Glasses During Simulated Night Driving With and Without Headlight Glare - PMC
The type of filters we recommend are selective high energy blue filters such as:
Prevencia by Essilor (Essilor Crizal | Discover Crizal Prevencia)
Enroute by Hoya (EnRoute | HOYA Vision Care)
Seecoat Next Blue by Nikon (Light Filtering Technologies)
DriveSafe Lenses by Zeiss (ZEISS Single Vision DriveSafe lenses)
Stop by our office anytime to learn more about these lens options!
Click here for the full CBC article: Headlights seem a lot brighter these days — because they are | CBC News
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