How To Stop Glasses Sliding Down Your Nose in 7 Ways
The year is 2021. There are exploration rovers looking for life on Mars. Trucks and cars are driving themselves. Planes and drones are flying themselves. You can order another human to deliver food to you with 3 clicks from the computer in your pocket. Your glasses, invented in the 13th century, are always sliding down your nose. Fear no more, here’s how to stop glasses sliding down your nose in 7 different ways. Although, the vast majority of people will only need the 1st and/or 2nd way.
1. Bend the Temple Tips
Go to your local optical shop/optometrist and ask the staff to bend the temple tips for you. They will usually do this for free. They’ll probably still do it even if you didn’t buy your glasses from that store.
Ask them to bend it until your temple tips firmly yet comfortably hook around the back of your ears.
It should like something like this.
Don’t forget to do a frantic head shake for at least a few seconds to test if it slides or not.
Also, I highly recommend quickly walking around to make sure it’s actually a good fit. In my experience, a great fit in the store can quickly turn into glasses sliding down your nose with a decent amount of movement.
If you want to be 100% certain, wear it the whole day and/or go for a run. That’ll be the truest test of if it sticks or slides.
If it still keeps sliding down, return to the store and see if they can bend the temple tips anymore to make it comfortably fit better.
WARNING: Do NOT try to bend the temple tips by yourself, regardless of what material they’re made of (usually plastic or metal). PLEASE leave it to the professionals. They have specialized equipment designed to do exactly this and they’re trained to do exactly this. The convenience of doing it yourself is not worth losing almost $250 if you snap/break it.
If this fails, proceed down to way 2!
2. Bend the Bridge
Another option is to bend the bridge (and top-bar if it exists) so that the temples move closer together.
This will help the glasses grip your head better. Again, head back to your local optical store and ask the staff to do this.
WARNING: Again, don’t try this by yourself.
If after some head-shaking/moving-around your glasses stop trying to escape your head then amazing! You have one less thing to worry about!
Otherwise, onto the 3rd way!
Get Creative
In my personal experience, I found that ways 1 and 2 mostly did the job. Anecdotally, I also feel this is the case for most people. Originally, I was pushing up my glasses literally at least once every 30 minutes. Now it’ll be 1 to 3 times a day at most after doing ways 1 and 2.
But unfortunately, I’m a pedantic neurotic. I wouldn’t rest until I didn’t have to push my glasses up my face at all (or at least the vast majority of the time).
If you feel like the first 2 ways were insufficient like I did, you can try each of the below workarounds and see what works for you. Note that I recount my personal experience with each one and if they didn’t work for me, they can still work for you.
3. Wrap Hair Ties Around Your Temple Tips
I’ve read stories online of people having success with this. However, for me, it only worked for a couple of weeks. The friction and intrusive pressure/shape of the wrapped hair ties against my ears eventually became unbearably painful. So I ditched them.
I’ve also read online stories of people using rubber bands and elastics in the same way. But based on my experience with the cottony hair ties… the thought of using rubber/elastic was just…
4. Anti-Slip Ear Grip Hooks
These can come in a variety of forms but I usually see them look like this.
These are better than hair ties because they actually conform to the curved shape of your ears. This means less pressure/force on your ears from the hook than from a hair tie. I actually had a huge amount of success with these. For about 2 years I wore these with no problems. I even occasionally bragged about how good they were to friends and family (weird flex but I was bizarrely really proud of them for reasons I can’t remember now).
However, in the 3rd year, the back of my ears started to get really really sore. Why this didn’t happen at all in the first 2 years of wearing hooks is still a mystery to me. These are usually made of silicone, rubber or a similar material. Hence, you can imagine the friction between the hook and your ears might become noticeable and a bit painful after some time.
I may be the exception here, but for me, the constant friction eventually led to some severe bruising, pain and bleeding behind the ears. After a while, I just got really bad headaches (I’m no doctor but I guess that’s not too surprising considering the ear-bleeding).
Eventually, the pain (and blood) largely outweighed the convenience so I ditched these too. Although they’re still incredibly popular so clearly not everyone has had the same painful experiences as me.
5. Nerdwax
Nerdwax is basically a tube of beeswax goo that you rub on the nose pads of your glasses.
The goo creates a layer of friction between your glasses and your skin which stop your glasses from sliding down your nose.
The Nerdwax goo itself is a blend of beeswax, coconut oil, and gum rosin (sounds like something you could make yourself honestly).
Personally, I haven’t tried this product myself. I have read a lot of positive reviews online from people saying it worked for them. In contrast, I also read some reviews stating the wax would dissolve faster than prefered or it was just ineffective in general. I mean, ultimately, a single tube is like $10. If I could pay $10 to stop this never-ending source of frustration on my face, I definitely would consider it (but I didn’t need to as you’ll see if you read on).
6. Homemade Variant of Nerdwax
Now instead of trying the Nerdwax myself, I got creative and tried something similar with what I already had on hand. What I did was I wrapped medical tape around the temple tips of my glasses then immediately peeled it off.
Peeling off the medical tape would leave behind a sticky residue on the temple tips. So basically it was my homemade version of Nerdwax that’s applied on the temple tips to grip the ears. Yeah look, I know it sounds a bit nasty. But honestly, it worked really well…
That was until I noticed the following annoying downsides:
- Shockingly, it wasn’t extremely comfortable to have your temple tips literally glued to your ears.
- At times I felt like it worked too well. Whenever I took my glasses off, the temple tips stuck so well to my ears that it felt like my ears were going to rip off my head at the same time. I got some serious whiplash from the recoil of my ears onto my head whenever I peeled my glasses off.
- The stickiness of the residue disappears as you sweat during high temperatures/exercise. Eventually, you’re just left with non-sticky residue.
So basically I just had a cheaper, harder-to-remove form of Nerdwax… not a fantastic solution I was satisfied with. But then finally I realized… (and this is the last way I’m going to talk about).
7. Wrap Temple Tips in Medical Tape
I have medical tape anyway, why don’t I just wrap the temple tips in medical tape. It can be like a really soft, near-frictionless ear grip on the temple tips that operate the same way the hair ties and hooks did.
It also doesn’t drastically alter the shape of the temple tips like hair ties or ear hooks do. Hence, there’s barely any extra pressure/force exerted on the ears at all.
I’ve been wearing my glasses like this for 2 months now and honestly, life has been all gravy. Well… gravy in the sense that usually I won’t need to push my glasses up my nose anymore. Also gravy in the sense that my ears are currently pain-free, bruise-free, and the blood within my ears stays inside my ears which is always a plus.
Takeaways to How To Stop Glasses Sliding Down Your Nose
Glasses are annoying but they’re expensive and we’re stuck with them. Therefore, we might as well make them comfortable. Modern glasses are designed to fit on your head without any external contraptions. Follow ways 1 and 2 and see if you can get a nice fit with only the glasses and for free! In the vast majority of cases, ways 1 and 2 are enough. However, you might also need one of the other various ways (or one I didn’t mention too) to help get that perfect fit. For me, ways 1 and 2 and the medical tape was what did the trick for me. Please let me know what worked for you!
Good luck and I hope you quickly find eyeglass slippage-free peace as I did!
Originally published at https://anxiouswebdev.com.
