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Stopping to smell the spring flowers can be hard when your nose is stuffy and your eyes are swollen. What makes red, puffy, itchy eyes so common in the springtime? While it’s often allergies, it isn’t always, so let’s take a look at what can cause allergies this time of year, along with what we…

We blink our eyes several times every minute of the day, but why do we need to? Count the number of times you blink in a minute (when you do this, don’t try blinking more or less frequently than you normally would). The typical number of blinks per minute for an adult is between ten…

Anyone who enjoys a nice tan should be aware of the risks of tanning booths. Those risks include ones to eye health. A group of physicians, dermatologists, surgeons, and even eye doctors went before Congress to describe the negative health effects of tanning beds, and the World Health Organization has warned for years that they…

Headaches can have a number of causes you wouldn’t expect, like an uncorrected vision problem. If you live with frequent headaches, it would be well worth your time to schedule an eye exam, if only to rule out a vision problem as the cause. Not all headaches are tied to vision and not all vision…

March is Workplace Eye Wellness Month, which makes it a great time to discuss eye safety on the job. That will mean very different things, depending on your line of work. A manual labor job can present a lot of direct dangers to eye safety, while an office-type job is more likely to cause a…

Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the United States has an undiagnosed eye condition. This startling statistic highlights the importance of regular eye exams for maintaining optimal vision health. We want to demystify the eye exam for anyone who has never had one and explain why they are so important for lifelong vision health. Your…

Glasses and contact lenses are small things that make a huge difference. If you wear glasses or contacts, you probably remember what it was like the first time you put them on and could suddenly see individual blades of grass and leaves on trees. The ability to see clearly is critical for so many of…

Contrary to popular belief, color blindness does not mean seeing in black and white. Usually. The vast majority of colorblind people can still see some colors. Let’s take a look at the three basic categories of color blindness and how they can impact a person’s daily life. Red-Green Color Blindness The most common type of…

Most of us notice a person’s eye color almost immediately when we meet them. A striking pair of eyes can make a deep impression, and what could be more striking than a pair of eyes that don’t match? In scientific terms, that’s heterochromia, a phenomenon fairly common in cats and dogs but much rarer in…

Do you spend a lot of time after the sun goes down looking at a bright screen? For as long as we’ve been using handheld devices to go online (and probably longer), many of us have had our eyes riveted to bright screens late into the evening. As optometrists, we can’t approve of this bedtime…