Can Pinhole Glasses Improve Your Vision?

Pinhole glasses are eyeglasses with lenses that consist of many tiny holes filling an opaque sheet of plastic. Also called stenopeic glasses, they block indirect rays of light from entering the eye. This prevents the rays from distorting your vision.

By letting less light into your eye, some people claim these glasses allow them to see more clearly.

This article will go over how pinhole glasses work and whether wearing pinhole glasses can improve your vision.

How Pinhole Glasses Work

Pinhole glasses have several uses. Some people use them as a treatment for myopia, also known as nearsightedness. Other people wear them to try to improve astigmatism.

Some people strongly feel that pinhole glasses treat vision conditions, but the evidence is lacking.

Squinting achieves the same thing as pinhole glasses because it reduces the size of indirect light rays that land on the retina. You can do the same thing by making a small circle with your thumb and your pointer and looking through it. You might not notice much of a difference if you don't have any significant vision problems. If you wear corrective lenses, however, you will notice an improvement, sometimes a significant one.

Pinhole glasses are mainly used by eye care specialists as a diagnostic tool. Many eye doctors use an occluder, an instrument used to cover one of your eyes while reading the eye chart. On one end, the occluder is solid. On the other end, the occluder has many tiny pinholes.

Sometimes healthcare providers use this to quickly see the potential of your vision. For example, if someone comes in for an office visit for an eye infection and they can only read the 20/70 size of letters on the eye chart, the doctor might wonder if it's the result of an eye infection or being nearsighted.

To quickly find out, the healthcare provider may perform a “pinhole” visual acuity test. If the patient looks through the pinholes and reads 20/25, then it could be assumed that most of the decreased vision is not due to the infection, but rather some type of uncorrected vision problem. It may be safe to assume that the infection may be reducing the vision only slightly.

The healthcare provider may not have time to find out what type of prescription the patient might need, because the person may have come in only to have the infection treated. Therefore, the pinhole test is a very quick way to find out more information about a person’s eye condition. Pinhole glasses are used in other ways to evaluate corneal distortion and cataracts.

Should You Try Pinhole Glasses?

For most of us, pinhole glasses are not functional enough to wear for day-to-day tasks. In general, pinhole glasses should only be used for diagnostic testing in the office.

People who have a significantly high prescription and break or lose their glasses may want to keep a pair of pinhole glasses around for emergency purposes.

Patients with aniridia may also benefit from pinhole glasses. Aniridia describes a complete or partial absence of the iris. The iris acts to control the amount of light allowed to enter the eye. When the iris is absent, the patient may suffer debilitating glare and visual distortion to the point where regular glasses or sunglasses do not help. The pinhole glasses will limit the amount of light coming in and produce clearer vision.

Summary

Pinhole glasses not only reduce brightness but also decrease peripheral vision. Therefore, they are unsafe to wear while driving or operating machinery. In almost all cases, other forms of correction will obtain a clearer vision. 

Many companies, including several on the web, advertise pinhole glasses. These companies often make extravagant claims about their benefits. You may have read that pinhole glasses clear vision by reducing refractive errors and permanently improving vision. However, no evidence exists to fully support these claims.