If you visit any optometrist or eye clinic for eye tests or plan on getting a pair of new eyeglasses, the topic of daily screen usage pops up. This is – almost always – followed by a recommendation that you should get blue-light filtering lenses.
They are supposed to protect your eyes from the harsh light beams coming from a screen, keep your sleep in order, and reduce eye strain, among other benefits.
Blue light glasses seem to offer none of those benefits, according to medical experts.
A team comprising of experts from the University of Melbourne reviewed 17 medical trials and found that blue light-blocking spectacles don’t offer any clear respite from staring at a screen.
Moreover, these glasses don’t appear to help with fixing the sleep cycle. Yep, there’s no magic recipe. It’s you, who scrolls hot chic clips on Instagram and stares at Reddit’s darkest corners until 3:30 am in the morning. Blue-light glasses won’t fix that.
Another important metric analyzed by the team was critical flicker‐fusion frequency, which is used in medical studies for measuring the strain and fatigue on human eyes. “This review found no clinically meaningful difference in changes to CFF with blue‐light filtering lenses compared to non‐blue‐light filtering lenses,” says the study.
The studies that more research is needed to study the long-term wearing effects of blue light glasses and with more diverse test subjects to understand their impact. You can read the entire paper in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.