Product Review: Anti-fogging products

One common complaint recently when patients come for an eye exam at Waverley Eye Care is that their glasses fog up when they are wearing masks.

Fogging of lenses occurs when the air around the lenses is warmer than the lenses themselves.   This causes tiny water droplets to condense on the lens.   Most quality eye glass lenses have an anti-reflection coating which is likely hydrophobic which means that water will bead up and roll off easily.   This will cause these tiny water droplets that condense on the surface of the lens to form little beads which will scatter light in random directions causing the fogging appearance.

So, what do you do about the fogging?  The real solution is to prevent fogging is to have a mask that has an effective seal, especially around the top and the nose.   This will prevent your warm breath from reaching the glasses and reduce fogging.   But most inexpensive masks and cloth masks have very poor or no seal around the nose what do you do then?

There are options in spectacle lenses that are designed to prevent fogging.  These lenses have coatings on them that are activated when wiped with a special lens cloth or solution that will cause the water droplets create a uniform film on the surface rather than microscopic beads.  This uniform film will allow light to refract through the lens with less deflection and will not appear to be fogged.   You can ask your optometrist at your next eye exam about options for this type of lens when you get new glasses.

So what happens if you don’t really want to purchase new glasses just to get anti-fog lenses?   We did a product review with a few products that are designed to reduce the fogging on your regular lenses.

We tried a popular lens spray we found on Amazon called Z clear.   You clean your lenses with this spray and is supposed to reduce fogging.   Our demonstration of this product showed very little anti-fogging effect.

We also tried another product called super anti-fog application solution.   This product seemed to reduce fogging slightly.

The two products that seemed to be the most effective were Optifog and Fogblocker lens cloths.   Optifog lens cloth is the activator cloth designed to be used with Optifog lenses, which is the ideal situation, but we tried the Optifog activator wipe on a regular lens and it seemed to have some anti-fogging effects.   Likewise, Fogblocker cloths seemed to work equally well.  Fogblocker cloths are designed to be used with any lens and are not made for a specific Fogblocker lens.  It is important to realize that these products won’t complete stop fogging but they may delay how quickly the fog forms and clear faster.