What popular product do you think is modern day snakeoil?

Irelephant@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 287 points –
594

You are viewing a single comment

Blue light filter on glasses. When I got my glasses, the lady said they come with blue light filter for free, and I said, “I don’t want that, my job requires that I see colors accurately, so I can’t have any sort of color filter.” She said don’t worry, it doesn’t filter any colors. Ok, then what the fuck is it exactly?

She was just upselling, not actually knowledgeable. They filter some blue spectrum, not the whole color blue.

They literally have no blue light filter in them. It was just marketing snake oil. I don’t even know why they do that. Who would want that in their glasses?

I thought it was a coating, like what they use to filter UV light. I have Theraspecs that do it, but those are sunglasses.

If it’s a UV filter, they should call it a UV filter, not a blue light filter. If it doesn’t filter blue light, then it’s not a blue light filter.

1 more...

I have a blue light filter on my glasses. I opted in because I sometimes use screens close to bed time for work.

I'm not going to tell you they work better then a placebo, but they work as good as one, and that's all I need.

They are 100% yellow tinted. Anyone who tells you they don't block blue light is a liar.

Same here, and I've tested it with a blue laser and the lenses block the blue laser almost completely. It's definitely a benefit to have the blue / UV filter coating on glasses. Another easy test is to walk outside in the bright June sunlight and look around with and without the glasses. The UV filtering reduces eye strain outdoors in the bright sun too, but obviously not as well as sunglasses.

1 more...
1 more...

Hmm wasn't expecting an actual answer on Quora but I was pleasantly surprised

I practice polyphasic sleep and reducing blue light is pretty important there to avoid messing your circadian rhythm.

The community recomends wearing the orange laser protection glasses, the same ones laser cutter operators use. Because that's what glasses actually have to look like to filter blue light.

That reminds me of my quora account. One of my answers gets a few views every once in a while and they send me ten notifications about it.

Anecdotally, I have two pairs of glasses where one has the filter and the other does not. I experience less eye strain when working at the computer with the filtered glasses. There's a definite yellow tint to them, but you don't notice after a while.

However, I 100% believe that it could be the placebo effect, so take from that what you will.

If yours have a yellow tint then at least they actually have a filter. Mine have zero tint whatsoever. (Which is what I want, but they were marketed to me as having blue light filter.)

I've worn blue filtered glasses for the past few years and there's definitely a noticeable tint to them

Most devices have a built in "night light" that does it anyway.

There are wave lengths that you cannot perceive, like, I don't know... UV, maybe?

Yes, but that’s called UV, not blue. Blue light filter is a thing, and this was not that.

1 more...