By Preston Fassel
It sounds like a scene out of one of those Tex Avery “[Blank] of Tomorrow” satirical cartoons created in the 40s and that ran into eternal syndication on local TV stations into the 80s. A family walks into their local dispensary to pick up a pair of glasses, or perhaps have an adjustment made. “Oh, but wait,” a strong-jawed authority figure in a lab coat says. “Do you know your glasses contain four trillion quatoparticles per square inch of human sweat and grime?” As an animated graphic demonstrates anthropomorphic sweat monsters leaping off a pair of horn rimmed frames, we’re of course offered the answer: The Cleanse-o-Matic 2000, a delightful, robot-esque contraption designed to keep your frames spic and span. “Wow, doctor,” a cat-eye besotted blonde gushes as she clasps her hands over her angora sweater. “My vision’s never been so clear, and my glasses have never been so clean!”
I’m being silly of course (and I’m also currently reading Thomas Frank’s excellent Conquest of Cool, a history of the post-war American advertising industry). Yet there’s more than a grain of truth to the fact neither ECPs nor patients tend to pay much attention to eyeglass sanitation, as my many years of scraping away green gunk from nosepads has demonstrated. Up until recently, the go-to answer has been the sonic cleaner, a device either broadly designed for jewelry care or specifically optical sanitation. We all know what I’m talking about: those little white trays you fill with water and a dollop of cleaning solution and then leave in the edging lab while you make small talk for a few minutes and a faint buzzing sound reverberates from behind a door. Up until just this May, that was even my gold standard. But then we get to that scene out of a Tex Avery movie, when I visited Dr. McDaniel at Glass Optical in Dallas for my yearly checkup and was introduced to a sight and presented with an offer I’d never encountered before:
“Would you like our robot to clean your glasses?”
And that’s how I met the Optic Wash, a roughly six-foot-tall device that was and did exactly what I was promised. It’s a robot that cleans your glasses.
Being a techno junkie from way back, I was of course intrigued, especially as I found out a free loyalty card came with every eye exam (rather than have patients pay money directly into the robot, they swipe a card provided by their ECP which comes pre-loaded with X number of washes). My glasses were admittedly pretty dirty that day (and I was planning on new frames; if they got busted, what was the difference?) so I decided to give it a whirl.
Rather than utilize potentially corrosive chemicals, the Optic Wash uses two pounds of water pressure blasted at the frames car-wash style along with powerful UV light to clean and sanitize. Like the sonic cleaners of yore, the process takes a few moments, although the public nature of the Optic Wash provides wearers (and unoccupied ECPs) with a miniature show: A cylindrical plastic door snaps shut, a psychedelic blue neon light comes on, and you’re provided with the spectacle of the frames being rotated and cleansed. At the end of the process, a hand-dryer style air dryer activates to blast any stray water particles off the frames, and at the end of it all the cylindrical door opens again, and you’re provided a pair of clean, dry glasses. I was impressed, and my imagination immediately began spinning on this article.
There are more than a few potential benefits to looking into an Optic Wash or similar device of your own. People trust what they can see, and for as little as most of us would like to admit, many of us are taken in by bright, shiny new tech. Optic Wash machines put on a show while impressing your patients that you’re the kind of practice that can employ a friendly robot to clean their glasses. The brief clean time is also just long enough to do a little pre-or-post exam frame styling, discuss lens options, or build a rapport with new patients. It’s a functional conversation piece that can lead to some productive conversations. If any of your patients are regular travelers, they may be even more impressed: Optic Washes have begun popping up in airport terminals around the world for peripatetic glasses wearers to get a quick rinse-on-the-go, so if your patient sees you’ve got tech that’s installed at JFK or LAX, your estimation may rise a little in their eyes. (Optic Wash cleans “in the wild” cost anywhere from $3-5, so that freebie loyalty card will also win over some points).
Sometimes spectacle, the excitement of the new, and the opportunity to feel young and wonderous about the world again is just what an exhausted patient needs to make their trip to the dispensary feel a little less obligatory and downbeat. Offering your patients the opportunity to watch a mini light show while a robot cleans their glasses may be just the spark they need to improve their day, and help you better serve them as an ECP.
