Uncool Tool: Liquid Lens
I'm pretty hard on my eyeglasses. I never keep them in their case, I drop them on the ground, and my kids get their little fingers, oozing with glass-etching sebaceous secretions, all over them. As a result, the lenses are full of tiny scratches. The center of the lenses have a cloudy spot. It's distracting (and made even worse by the fact that I've had a big gray floater in my right eye since 1998).
I was at Target this weekend picking up some Christmas decorations and came across this $10 product, called Liquid Lense: Easy 2 Step Lense Treatment Kit. It's supposed to fill and seal surface scratches with some kind of liquid polymer.
I bought it. At home, I followed the instructions, cleaning the glasses and then painting the clear polymer onto the lenses using the included mascara-type brush. After letting it cure for 8 hours, I put on my glasses. The scratches were still there. Worse the layer of clear polymer was uneven, giving everything a blurry funhouse mirror look. I washed the stuff off using the remover solution and tried again. The problem was just as bad, if not worse. I tried it on glasses and even on my cell phone display. Everything ended up worse, not better than before. Don't buy this stuff.
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Mark Frauenfelder
My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.
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