Proposition 65 Warning on Readers Eyeglasses

September 4, 2018, by Debra Lynn Dadd

I’ve been wearing reading glasses for years. I have prescription glasses too for driving, but readers work fine for reading and they are inexpensive. I like to have a pair in my purse, a pair at my desk, and a pair next to the bed, and that adds up when you are buying prescription glasses.

Over the years I have purchased a lot of reading glasses and have done some research on the plastics used for frames.

However, I have never seen a warning label on eyeglasses of any kind until Labor Day weekend when I tried to order a pair of glasses online from readers.com. I got all the way to checkout and was just about to click on the “buy” button when the warning above came up.

What???? I had just purchased a different pair of glasses from readers.com a few days before and there was no warning. but now here it was.

I just called Readers.com and they told me they are required by law to post this warning in the State of California. Not all of their readers contain nickel or BPA, but some do so they put the warning on all. She also could not tell me what specific plastics were used in the plastic frames.

So my problem with this is

1. This is not a useful warning label because these substances known to the State of California to cause cancer may or may not actual be in the product to which the warning label is attached, and

2. We can’t find out by asking the retailer what the materials are for any specific pair of glasses, so we can’t determine if the warning labels apply to this particular pair or not.

The representative from Readers.com also said that if I went to another website and there was no warning label, that doesn’t mean the glasses do not contain nickel or BPA, it just means they didn’t put the warning label as they are required to do by law.

This warning label applied this way just isn’t helpful and isn’t a warning label at all.

I’m already in the process of doing more research about this. We should be able to buy a pair of glasses and know what material is in contact with our skin for hours on end every day. It may be perfectly fine, but the point is, we should be able to know.