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What’s a poor-sighted person’s worst nightmare? Breaking a pair of glasses. If you haven’t been glasses shopping lately, brace yourself to empty your bank account: glasses are expensive. With all the options available (designer frames, light-changing lenses, wire or plastic frames, and enough colors to fill a Crayola crayon box), it’s no wonder people would rather glue their glasses together than go shopping for a new pair.

So where should you buy your glasses? Where can you walk out with a pair of quality frames for a price that won’t break the bank? Which places will still give you expert staff, quality fittings, and tons of selection? Here are the best places to buy your next pair of frames. Happy shopping!

The Best Place to Buy Your Glasses: Costco Optical

According to Consumer Reports, the top place to get your next pair of glasses is Costco Optical, where the average cost of a pair of glasses ran around $157. Your next best bet if you want to shop local (or you don’t have a Costco membership) is an independent glasses shop around town, where consumers paid around $211 a pair. No local eyeglass shops around? Head to a private doctor’s office. A pair from your local private doctor will set you back about $212.

The Worst: JCPenney

Don’t go to JCPenney, America’s Best Contacts & Eyeglasses, Visionworks, Eyemasters, or Pearle Vision, cautions Consumer Reports. These five companies had the five worst rankings of all glasses providers.

Curious about what your friends’ favorite glasses stores are? Consider installing a survey from kissinsights.com to learn where your friends get their specs.

Most people take their vision for granted. You ask your eyes to work hard: staring at computer screens, reading without proper lighting, driving at night and dealing with trying to see between darkness and bright flashes of light. Your eyes suffer through a lot: not getting enough rest, being attacked by wind, pollen, smoke, and other irritants in the air, and getting rubbed by you. And yet, while you may think about pampering other parts of your body that you put through the ringer, like giving your feet a soak and pedicure, or having a back and neck massage, you probably don’t think about how you can treat your eyes. Vision is something you count on every day. Why not take a few steps to ensure your eye health remains at full strength and your vision in top working order.

To pamper your eyes, try this eyecare tip: soak cotton balls or pads in a dish of cold milk. Then put the pads over your eyes and take deep breaths. Relax this way for ten to fifteen minutes and feel your eyes rejuvenate, and perhaps other parts of you will feel recharged as well. Another soothing remedy for tired eyes is to slice a few cucumber rounds and place the slices over your closed eyes, or try grated or sliced cold potato as a compress that also lessens darkness around the eyes. You should feel a cooling sensation with all of these remedies, and afterward your vision may even be improved.

Strained and tired eyes are not working at optimal levels, so these little eyecare tips may sound like pampering, but, in fact, they do indeed benefit your eye health and vision. Closing your eyes and placing something cool over them relaxes your whole body, so your general health may even be improved just by following these simple eyecare bonus moves. Your skin, particularly dark circles under the eyes, may look better, too, which makes you feel better. And feeling better may be the best thing you can do for your vision and general health.

Astigmatism is a condition in which parts of the eye are shaped abnormally, causing a refractive error (mistakes in how your eye sees light) and making it difficult to focus on objects clearly. Astigmatism comes in two varieties: regular, and irregular. Regular astigmatism is caused by an abnormal shape to the lens or cornea of the eye, which divides the light that hits it into two points of entry into the eye. The resulting effect is like looking at two very slightly different views of the same object; for example, a round dot may appear to be a stretched-out oval or even a line to a person with astigmatism, depending upon how severe their case is.
Irregular astigmatism is caused by corneal scarring; scattering in the crystalline lens is also a possible cause. Either way, irregular astigmatism cannot be corrected with eyeglasses, but can be corrected with the use of contact lenses. Contact lenses can assist with regular astigmatism, as well; a special kind of contacts called toric lenses are needed to correct both crystalline lens and corneal distortions. Toric lenses have a particular shape: one raised ring within another larger raised ring, like two donuts nested together. Toric lenses can correct both kinds of astigmatism, though they must continue tobe used because they are not a permanent fix.
Symptoms of astigmatism include blurry vision, particularly horizontal or vertical blurring, seeing straight lines as curved or tilted, headaches, eyestrain, fatigue, and frequent squinting to try to see more clearly. Milder cases may not have many or any of these symptoms except for the difficulty in focusing on objects. Astigmatism is a very common vision problem; several studies of local populations found that over 30 percent of people had the condition.
Astigmatism is commonly treated with eyeglasses, contact lenses, or various types of laser surgery. Regular LASIK surgery, lens transplants, and corneal re-shaping via rigid gas-permeable contacts are among the permanent fixes for the condition. The natural alternative is eye exercises, which are said to cure nearsightedness and farsightedness as well if followed properly. There are different eye exercise programs for different conditions.

Subconjunctival hemorrhaging, or hyposphagma for short, is a condition in which there is bleeding beneath the conjunctiva of the eye. The conjunctiva is a thin membrane that covers the whites of the eyes and the insides of the eyelids; hyposphagma occurs when some of the numerous tiny blood vessels in the conjunctiva are ruptured and blood leaks into the space between the eye and the conjunctiva. This is almost exactly what happens when a bruise forms under the skin, creating a dark spot due to the extra blood moving up into the broken layers beneath the skin. However, with hyposphagma the conjunctiva is a transparent skin, so instead of turning yellow or dark purple like a bruise, the whites of the eyes turn a bright red because the blood is fully visible.

Hyposphagma can be caused by a surprisingly wide variety of ordinary things. Generally, anything that puts excessive strain on the eyes to the point of increasing their pressure levels can cause hyposphagma. Common causes include extreme and prolonged stress, violent coughing, sneezing, choking or vomiting, severe hypertension, laser eye surgery, and excessive use of blood-thinning substances as ordinary as aspirin, ginseng and garlic. The more extreme ways of developing the condition include pulling high g-forces, suffering minor trauma to the eye, and having a helmet or mask squeeze your head due to a driving accident, increasing the volume of pressure inside abruptly.

Hyposphagma can happen to people of any age; in infants it can be a sign of vitamin C deficiency. Standard treatments are minimal and natural enough: once significant and potentially dangerous trauma to the eye or infection has been ruled out, an individual with hyposphagma is supposed to simply wait for it to heal up on its own. The process takes up to two weeks, during which the bright red in the eye may become fringed with yellow like a standard bruise. This is normal, and shouldn’t be a concern. Taking aspirin or NSAIDs is discouraged during recovery, as they can slow the healing process. Hyposphagma is painless and generally harmless, despite the disturbing appearance.

Amblyopia, also calledLazy Eye, is a condition in which one or both eyes are deprived of the necessary stimulation to develop normally, resulting in poor, weak and unfocused vision in the affected eye. Amblyopia should not technically be referred to as Lazy Eye, because this name is also used for strabismus–a misalignemnt of one or both eyes while an individual with amblyopia has perfectly-aligned eyes despite their appearance. Symptoms of the condition include stronger vision in one eye than the other, a slight to severe visual effect of one eye pointing in a different direction than the other (commonly toward the inner corner of the eye), and poor depth perception. Several kinds of amblyopia do not have the eyes pointing different directions, however.

Amblyopia occurs when one or both eyes is not exposed to visual stimulation for long enough during the developmental stage of the brain: the first two years of life in humans. The condition is scientifically proven to be a problem with the brain, not the eyes–the vision problems are due to insufficient stimulation of the forming optic nerves, not the eyes themselves. In short, if one eye sees worse than the other, the brain ignores that eye and favors the strong one, so the muscles of the weak eye atrophy and make the condition worse.

Because all amblyopia is caused by this same optic nerve deprivation, it can be caused by anything that blocks one eye from seeing during the first two years of life, including cataracts, corneal scarring, and strabismus that causes the eye that faces in a different direction to be so far out of alignment that the eyelid covers all or part of it.

Amblyopia is treated by covering the good eye with an eyepatch, which forces the brain to use the weaker one and slowly develops the vision in that eye until they can both see well. Eyedrops can help speed up the process, as can visual therapy. Treatment for amblyopia is most effective in individuals age 7 and younger, but research shows that adults and teens can also benefit from them.

The formal Latin name for Dry Eye Syndrome is keratoconjunctivitis. Dry Eye Syndrome is a condition in which the tear ducts don’t produce enough tears, resulting in dry, itchy eyes. Symptoms include a gritty, sandy sensation in the eye, redness, pain, pressure behind the eyes, stinging, light sensitivity, tired-feeling eyes, and sometimes stringy discharge. Both eyes are affected by Dry Eye Syndrome.

Watery eyes is another symptom, ironically enough. These tears are in response to the dry, gritty feel of the eyes. Unfortunately, because they are the quicky-produced watery kind of tears used to rid the eyes of irritants, they don’t have the carefully balanced chemistry of your regular tears, so they won’t do much to help with the condition. Dry Eye Syndrome doesn’t generally damage your vision or have severe symptoms–it’s usually just irritating and uncomfortable. However, if you don’t treat it or in rare severe cases, it can lead to complications that can damage your vision.

Symptoms worsen when an individual with Dry Eye Syndrome does any activity that slows the blinking rate, because blinking coats the eye with tears to wet it. Activities that slow blinking include reading, driving, using a computer, watching television, and anything else that involves staring at one spot for a long time. Smoke, wind, dust, fans, heaters, hair dryers and other conditions that dry the air around you worsen symptoms. Foggy weather, rain and humid places like the shower or a sauna improve the symptoms, because the air is moist.

Typical treatments involve using eye drops regularly to reduce symptoms, and puntual occlusion, a procedure in which the tear drainage canals are plugged with silicon plugs to keep tears on the eyes longer. Natural treatments are mostly related to overall body health, since decreased tear production is a system-related condition. To help alleviate or prevent Dry Eye Syndrome, avoid excessive sugar and artificial sweeteners. You should also be sure that you aren’t deficient in vitamins A, B6 or C; A in particular is linked with eye health. Taking Potassium can dramatically improve dry eye symptoms, as can eating enough essential fatty acids.

There are few things as distracting as a developing a lengthy case of Blepharospasm. Usually recognized for the symptom described in its much more common name–eye twitching–Blepharospasm also tends to cause excessive blinking and sensitivity to light. This condition affects roughly 25,000 Americans per year, with women being three times as likely to develop it as men, and can last anywhere from a day to several years straight! People who develop eye twitching tend to be in the 50 to 60 year range; distressingly, it’s a common myth that there isn’t much you can do about it except wait for it to go away.

Since no conventional drugs have been found to work on Blepharospasm, the mainstream treatment for it is to administer a deadly toxin that actually weakens the muscles in your eye in order to make them stop twitching! This toxin is one of the deadliest ones known; it’s called Botulinum toxin, but perhaps you would recognize it better by its brand name: BOTOX.

Before risking eyelid drooping and double vision from having a deadly toxin injected near your eyeball, try some natural remedies. Eye twitching is frequently caused by stress; this means that relaxation is a very effective way of treating Blepharospasm. Take a few minutes to breathe easy and soak in a hot bath. Try resting with an eye mask on; the heating or cooling kinds are particularly effective. Hot or cold compresses work just as well, if you don’t have an eye mask on hand.

Cutting down your caffeine intake can do wonders for Blepharospasm, as when you’re “wired” on caffeine it actually puts the body under more stress. Finally, ensure that you get enough sleep–8 hours per night is ideal.

If rest and relaxation don’t help, and if your eye twitching persists for a lengthy amount of time, pay your doctor a visit. Why? Because even if you would never agree to taking BOTOX injections for Blepharospasm, in some cases a prolonged (months or years) or severe eye twitch is caused by something more serious, such as epilepsy or minor brain and nerve damage.

There are several vitamins that can help to naturally improve your vision. In addition to improvement, they can also help to prevent the development of cataracts, vision loss and macular degeneration associated with age. Here are some of the best vitamins for optimal vision.

Vitamin A helps you to achieve better night vision. Vitamin C, in addition to being the most commonly-known immune system boosting vitamin, have also been known to prevent cataracts. In fact, studies have shown that taking up to 600 mg of vitamin C daily can decrease your risk of developing cataracts by as much as 70 percent! As if that and the boosted immune system weren’t enough, vitamin C also helps delay macular degeneration, and staves off reduced eye pressure that glaucoma patients are prone to. Vitamin E helps defend your body from free radicals. These unstable substances in the body are known to play a role in the effects of aging, and can cause damage to organs, including the eyes.

With the eyes being the largest concentration of it in the entire body, zinc seems to play an important role in vision; it’s also known to enhance the immune system’s defenses. Selenium, commonly found in fish, red meat, poultry and garlic, helps the body to absorb vitamin E, so taking a supplement of selenium helps defend your organs from the damaging effects of free radicals as well. Bilberry has been known to prevent macular degeneration, and is also a good source of vitamin C. Glutathione is a great help to the eyes, having been found to help prevent cataracts, glaucoma, blindness associated with diabetes, and retinal disease.

Lutein helps the body make its own “sunglasses”; it prevents some of the visible blue light from entering your retina, helping to prevent the most common cause of light-induced vision damage. Finally, bioflavonoids–the natural coloring in many fruits and vegetables–have been found to have numerous health benefits in many studies. Starting to improve your vision naturally is as easy as eating more colorful foods; for the most benefits, though, you may want to take several of these vitamins at once.