Prescription Eyewear

ADS Sports Eyewear features a variety of prescription sunglasses online. This section provides information about locating prescription eyewear on this site, as well as a helpful summary of things you should know about corrected vision. We offer great prices, free shipping, secure checkout and a liberal return policy. We also have an awesome lifetime warranty for people who are hard on your prescription sunglasses. Place an order, but before you order any prescription sunglasses online, be sure to look for a few key elements provided below.

When lenses for prescription sunglasses and prescription sports sunglasses are available, you will see one of the following symbols next to the price:

If your favorite pair of prescription sports sunglasses or regular glasses don't appear to be available with prescription lenses, let us know. Depending on your prescription, we may be able to fit Rx lenses into traditionally non-Rx-able frames.

Rx Available In-Frame indicates that the lens depicted in the photograph can be made as a prescription lens. Your prescription will look identical to the plano (non-prescription) version of these glasses.

Rx Available Insert indicates that a prescription insert can be made to fit behind the tinted lens. The glasses can be worn with or without this insert.

The "prescription add-on price" is always for one set of Single Vision prescription lenses.  If you are getting prescription lenses for glasses that normally have interchangeable lenses, your prescription lenses will NOT be interchangeable.  They will be permanently mounted in the frame.  So please indicate the lens option you would like in the Comments Box on the Checkout Page.  The only exception to this rule is the Wiley-X SG-1 glasses.  The SG-1 lenses are mounted in a removable gasket that makes this interchangeability possible.

If you order the SG-1 glasses, either update the quantity of prescription lenses in your shopping cart to the number of lenses that the come with your glasses, or indicate which lens option you want Rx-ed in the Comments Box.

When you get prescription lenses, your choices are not limited to the stock lenses that are listed with that frame.  Regardless of whether you get in-frame or insert, you can select the lenses you want from the following chart:

Lens Type	-  -  -  -  - Lens Material -  -  -  -  -
	Polycarbonate	Trivex®	SR-91
Single Vision	$119.00	$149.00
Aspheric Single Vision	$137.00	$229.00
Bifocal	$139.00	$154.00
Progressive	$295.00	$329.00
Transitions or Photochromic (Lenses that darken in sunlight)
Transitions Single Vision	$199.00	$224.00
Transitions Aspheric Single Vision	$229.00	$239.00
Transitions Bifocal	$259.00	$249.00
Transitions Progressive	$319.00	$359.00
Polarized Lenses
Polarized SV	$189.00	N/A	$329.00
Polarized Aspheric SV	$219.00	N/A
Polarized Bifocal	$239.00
Polarized Progressive	$369.00	N/A	$479.00
Polarized Progressive Transitions	$562.00	N/A
Lens Treatments
Standard Anti Reflective Coating	$55.00
Premium Anti Reflective Coating	$95.00
Solid Tint	$15.00
Gradient Tint	$19.00
Flash (mirror) Coat	$80.00

For more information on the new Trivex® lens material, check our Lens Material page.  Because Trivex® is so new, it is not available in large 8-base blanks that are needed for some of the wrap-style frames like the Panoptx and Wiley-X motorcycle glasses. 

To select one of the lens options listed above, add the glasses you want to your Shopping Cart without checking the "Add Rx" box.  Then go to your Shopping Cart and write (or paste) the lens options you would like in the Comments Box, and enter the total cost of these selections in the Price field.  If you just hate doing this sort of thing, call us at 866-829-6522 and we will be happy to walk you through it.

Hint:  If you notice that the prices listed above differ slightly from the prescription add-on price listed with your favorite pair of glasses, pick the cheaper one!!

We love a challenge. If you have a strong prescription, or you've had difficulty buying prescription-sports glasses in the past, we want to help. Just tell us what activity the glasses are for and send us your prescription. We will determine which glasses are most compatible with your prescription and send you a list of options. We will also give you our recommendation and tell you what we based it on. Email your request to Rx@ADSeyewear.com or fax it to (972) 398-3889. You are under no obligation, and there is no charge for this service. If your prescription is so far off the chart that it changes the standard prescription price, this exercise will also give us an opportunity to calculate that into the options we give you.

The Prescription Information Form pictured below will appear on the checkout page.

If you are not absolutely, positively sure how to fill out this form, fax your prescription to (972) 398-3889. Be sure to include your full name, as well as the name and phone number of the examining doctor's office.

If your prescription is a simple sphere, you only need to fill in the first and last columns.

If your prescription does not indicate the "PD Measurement", you should contact the last place that sold you prescription eyewear and ask for it. PD stands for Pupilary Distance, or the distance from one pupil to the other measured in millimeters. This number is used to align the optical center of the lens with your eye.  A Monocular PD Measurement is preferred.  This consists of two separate measurements from the center of your noggin to each pupil. A binocular measurement will be one number that represents the distance from one pupil to the other.  A binocular measurement assumes that your head is symmetrical and that your nose is exactly in the center of your face.  Examining doctors rarely write this measurement on your prescription form, but any store that has sold you prescription eyewear will have it.

If you'd like to understand all of the information on the prescription form shown above, there is a summary printed below titled Understanding the Prescription Form. Most of that information won't help you order a pair of glasses, but you might impress your friends playing Trivial Pursuit someday.

Delivery time:
The amount of time required to assemble and ship prescription orders will vary depending on the eyewear manufacturer and your prescription. You should expect about three to seven days in the lab.  Feel free to contact us once you've selected your glasses and we will give you a more specific guestimate.

Prescription returns:
If we make a mistake filling your prescription, we will promptly make it right. Even if the problem is the fault of the manufacturer, we will handle the problem for you until it's rectified. Simply follow the guidelines listed in our Return Policy. If on the other hand you send us the wrong information, we will still fix the problem just as fast as we can. We will also charge you for the additional lenses. This would be another good reason to fax us a current prescription.

Try before you buy:
Because prescription glasses are not returnable, you may want to make sure you like them before we start grinding lenses. To help facilitate this, we give you an opportunity to try out a non-prescription version first. Simply order the plano version of the glasses, and check the "Try Before You Buy" box on the checkout page. ("plano" indicates that the glasses are not prescription.) Fill in the prescription form just as you would if you had ordered prescription lenses. This will give us an opportunity to check the compatibility of the glasses you chose with your prescription.

If you like the glasses, email us or call 866-829-6522 and confirm that you want the prescription version. Then return the plano glasses in the same box that we used to ship them to you before they start looking used. (You have up to 10 business days to return the try-out pair.) Include all the original documentation and accessories that were with the glasses when you received them.  We will not charge you for shipping either pair of glasses. Naturally, if we don't get the plano pair of glasses back, or if they are not in re-sellable condition, you will be charged for those as well. For this reason, we recommend insuring glasses in transit.

If you're not thrilled with your try-out pair of glasses, just follow the instructions in our Return Policy for exchanging or returning them. You're under no obligation to buy, there is never a restocking fee, and we don't want you to keep anything that you're not enthusiastic about wearing.

To help expedite this process, we may not send your try-out pair of glasses in the exact color that you ordered. We will match your color preference as closely as possible, but our goal is to let you check out the feel and fit of the glasses. If you REALLY need to try out glasses that will be identical to the prescription version that you want, indicate this in the comment section of the checkout page. If we do not have what you want in stock, we will promptly order them and ship them to you as soon as we get them.

Understanding the Prescription Form:
This information is at the bottom of the page because it's really the last thing you need to know when ordering a pair of glasses. But we think you'll be a better person for reading it, and educated consumers are more fun to work with.

For starters, OD and OS translate to right eye and left eye. They're from the Latin words Oculus Dexter and Oculus Sinister.

Props may help us illustrate these next points. So set a round plastic bowl in front of you and imagine that it's your eye. If your bowl has the correct curvature, images will come into focus clearly on your retina. Congratulations, you're emmetropic and you don't need corrective lenses. If the curve of your bowl is too flat, images will focus on a spot somewhere behind your retina, and you're farsighted or hyperopic. If the curve of your bowl is too steep, images will focus in front of your retina, and you're nearsighted or myopic. Hyperopes correct their vision with a plus lens. This is a magnifying lens, so the center is thicker than the edges. Myopes correct their vision with a negative lens that is thicker around the edges than it is in the center.

Rimless eyewear looks better on hyperopes because their plus prescriptions are thinnest around the visible edge.

So far, these near or farsighted illustrations only explain simple spherical variations that are corrected with simple single-power lens. Patients with these vision impairments can simply complete the Prescription Information Form by entering the SPHERE and Pupilary Distance.

But if you go back to your plastic bowl and gently push the outside edges toward the center with each hand, you create astigmatism. Your bowl has a different radius of curvature from left to right than it does up and down. The difference in curvature is the amount of CYLINDER you will need in your prescription. The angle of the curve down the center of your bowl is the AXIS of that cylinder.

Most prescriptions are written with the steepest curve as the sphere. The next number is the cylinder. The minus sign before the cylinder indicates the difference in curvature from this steepest curve to the flattest, which will always be 90 degrees apart.

This is called negative cylinder format. A few doctors still write prescriptions the other way around, with the flat curve listed in the sphere, a plus sign before the difference in the other axis, and then the axis location is noted 90 degrees off of what the other format would indicate. Either format will result in the same lens. Doctors who write prescriptions in plus cylinder form were probably nonconformists in the 60's also.

The ADD column is for bifocal or progressive lens wearers. As we age, the crystalline lens behind the cornea loses some of its flexibility. It's a natural part of the aging process, and sooner or later it affects everybody. To focus on something close to your face, this lens must flex into a tighter arch. As it loses flexibility, it loses its ability to accommodate this tighter focus. This is called presbyopia, and it has nothing to do with being nearsighted or farsighted. Hyperopes (farsighted), myopes (nearsighted) and emmetropes (no correction needed) will all eventually lose their ability to focus on things close up.

The last column is Pupilary Distance, or PD. Your binocular PD is the distance from the center of one pupil to the other. The form above requests your monocular PD, which divides your binocular PD at the bridge of your nose. Faces are not always symmetrical, so these numbers may not be the same. This measurement is used to insure that you are looking through the optical center of a lens.

If your prescription includes an ADD power, your prescription may have two PD measurements. One is your Pupilary distance when you look at a distance. The other is a lesser number indicating your PD when you focus on objects closer to your face.

Congratulations. We are sincerely in awe of anyone who has the tenacity and thirst for knowledge to make it this far down the page. Frankly, we think you're a little weird, but we're still really impressed.

You can't really understand prescription lenses without some knowledge of diopters and base curve, but I'm betting this is where you start feeling the need to go surf somewhere else. So click here, buy a pair of glasses, then come back and finish the page.



Welcome back. These last two points deal with the curvature of a lens. The unit of measure used to indicate the strength of a lens is diopters. The strength of the SPHERE, CYLINDER and ADD powers are all are given in diopters.

So just to reinforce this, let say our next lens is three times as strong. Now we have a 3-diopter curve, so the radius of a circle created by extending this curve all the way around will only be about 7 inches, or one third the size of a 1-diopter curve. If parallel beams of light pass through this lens, they will come to a focus in 1/3 of a meter, or 3 times faster.

The lens shown above illustrates why people who hate adding positive and negative numbers together shouldn't be opticians. The front curvature of a lens is on a convex surface, so the curve is positive. The back surface is concave. A concave surface will deflect light in exactly the opposite way as a convex surface would. For this reason, the curvature is measured as a negative. Therefore, a plus seven-diopter front curve and a minus 6-diopter back curve result in a plus one-diopter lens. The front and back curvatures are added together to arrive at the power of the lens.

If the front curve stayed the same, and the back curve was increased to minus nine, we would have a negative lens. The power would be minus two, and the edges would be thicker than the center. This prescription would be for a myopic or nearsighted person.

Base Curve
Base curve is a term that should be understood by anyone who wears any kind of glasses, prescription or not. Sunglass manufacturers often display terms like base 6 or 8-base in the description of their products. This indicates the curvature measured in diopters on the front side of the lens. If the lens is a plano lens (no power), the back curvature will be the exact opposite of the front. Many people find that their eyes become accustomed to a base curve, and getting used to new glasses that have a different base curve requires some time.

This is especially true of people who wear prescription glasses. If you've ever been more comfortable wearing your old glasses than your new ones, have the base curve checked in both of them. Any optician with a lensometer or a lens clock can do this in no time. If you can identify a base curve that your eyes prefer, note this in the comments section of the checkout page. This will help us create the most comfortable glasses possible for you.

High Minus Prescriptions in Big Wrap Glasses

We are often asked if we can put prescriptions stronger than –4.00 or –5.00 in frames with a big 8-base curve on the front.  The answer is yes, we can do almost anything.  But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. 

The term “8-base frame” indicates that the eyewear frame has the same curve as a +8 Diopter lens surface.  This curve is about the same shape as the average person’s head.  Therefore sunglasses with an 8-base curve typically provide the best protection from the sun, they fit better on your face, and minimize “bounce-back”.  (Bounce-back refers to the sun hitting the back of the lens and reflecting into your eye.)  This shape is even more important for high-speed sports like motorcycling where the eyewear also needs to prevent air from swirling around behind the lens.

If you memorized the Diopter information above, you know that a high minus prescription in a frame with a +8 curve on the front will create a very steep back curve and a lens that is very thick on the outside edge.  For example, a –6.00 prescription lens in an 8-base frame will have a back curve that is –14.00.  The steeper this curve is, the smaller the in-focus portion of the lens will be.  A steep back curve can also cause your vision to have a fish bowl effect where objects become stretched or bent as your gaze moves away from the optical center of the lens.  An astigmatism could make this distortion even worse.

High index lens materials are often used to flatten lens curves and reduce lens thickness, but this is not an option for sports eyewear.  High index lens material will bend light more efficiently and make the lens a little flatter and thinner.  But all of the higher index materials are breakable.  Having a lens that can shatter is not what you want in front of your eyes for sports activities or motorcycling.

There are two manufacturers that have actively pursued a solution to this problem.  Panoptx and Adidas.

Panoptx designed an adaptor that allows a lens with a flatter front curve to fit in two of their 8-base motorcycle glasses.  With this adaptor, the Panoptx Bora CV and the Diablo CV can hold prescriptions as high as a minus 13.  By flattening the front curve with this adaptor the back curve is also significantly reduced; the lens is thinner; and the in-focus portion of the lens is larger.

The Adidas line of sports glasses utilizes a well-designed optical insert that is hidden behind the tinted lens.  These frames provide excellent sun protection and comfort for any athlete.  Because the insert is flatter and smaller than the tinted lens, the back curve of the insert is much less severe than it would be in a typical 8-base frame. 

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