Difficulties obtaining anti-fog coatings.  Well, they have always taken some time to have any extra coating added to your safety glasses, be it an anti-reflective, mirror, or anti-fog coating and customers tend to expect that from something additional to the standard.  What they haven’t been accustomed to being the dramatic increase in production time to have an anti-fog coating added to their lenses.

Due to the increased necessity of this coating as we have been forced into wearing face masks on a regular basis.  I imagine everyone has suffered from the inability to see through their glasses or sunglasses due to lens fogging while wearing a mask.

On a side note, the fogging makes it difficult for Optometrists to test your vision.  As I have observed daily with repeated removal of glasses and wiping the lens to remove the fogging.  Which results in eye tests taking much longer than previously.

So how long do we expect an anti-fog coated lens to take to be created?  It was taking approximately 3-4weeks.  But as Shamir has amalgamated its OHS and normal lenses companies and the software hasn’t coped.  So things that would take 10 days are taking 3 weeks at the moment and anti-fog coatings have blown out to over a month.

The reason that I have written this blog article involves the very real need to plan.  If you are going to need prescription safety glasses, then you need to plan on ordering them over a month before you need them if they have an anti-fog coating.

It may be that Shamir will get back on track in the next month or so, but as we close in on the end of the year.  People try and use their health fund benefits so the number of orders going through tends to increase as well.  So the moral of the story is to get your order in early.

Another note is that for many of the frames you can have the anti-fog and the anti-reflect coatings we just need to add the option as previously you could only have one or the other.