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Comment by twawaaay | Hacker News Reader

I use similar method, except:

- Do not apply soap to the lenses. Soap is too thick. Apply it to your fingers and rub between fingers to dilute with a bit of water before applying to glasses.

- Use your fingertips as abrasive. Soap is there to dissolve any fats but your fingertips (if clean) are best material to remove anything from your glasses without scratching the surface.

- Few faucets give good laminar flow. I just blow over the glasses. If you do this right, your glass are not scratched and you have cleaned them well, all water will slide off easily.

- Don't ever use towels on either frames or glasses. Towels can easily scratch glass not to mention much softer frames.

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I second this. Don’t use any kind of cloth. Just blow over your glasses a few times, droplets will disappear. Even finest cloth will leave scratches over time. Also it will reapply dirt and grease that naturally builds up as you use it

Instead of wiping with cloth, I use a hair dryer in cold setting.

That's bad. You don't want to dry it, you want to remove the water BEFORE it has a chance to dry out.

If you just dry it out, the mineral residue from water will be left on your glasses.

More than that, mineral crystals are incredibly abrasive so next time you try to clean the glasses they will be abrading and destroying your perfect glass surface.

The author of the submission mentions they use distilled water , presumably for this reason

For starters, I have responded to a comment from a user, not to the submission.

And second, using distilled water to clean your glasses must be strong contender for least practical glasses cleaning technique.

Blow the water off

Find that jug of distilled water (make sure there is one at work and at your parents in law), then rinse with it (you can do it, hold the jug in one hand and the glasses in the other, don't use all the water), then use the hair dryer on cold to dry your glasses.

If you need distilled water and hair dryer to do it the result will be permanently dirty glasses, not clean ones.

> Don't ever use towels on either frames or glasses.

Maybe because I get the non-scratch coating, but this has never been an issue for me. Have been doing it for twenty years without issue. Assuming lenses are replaced every several years, which they should be.

Do you get scratch resistant frames, too?

The scratches on the glass do not have to be visible. The surface just gets a tiny bit matte, reducing the contrast and also making cleaning a bit bigger problem.

As to the frames, except for the unavoidable wear and tear in places where it can't be avoided, my current main daily driver Tom Ford acetate glasses look as shiny as on the day I got them, 3 years ago.

My friend has similar frames and they look matte, after less than a year.

No, but they are titanium and don't scratch. Well, not with towel anyway.

Titanium frame is my latest love iteration of my glasses. It makes them more light. I've found that's what I find annoying about glasses, the weight on my head. Not the peripheral. In fact, I've tried lenses various times, and never have been able to go with it. Too much discomfort.

I would like to add: the weight on my nose is more discomforting than grease on my glasses. I sometimes clean my glasses and I'm afterwards like wow, that was dirty. But did it really bother me? Not really. I rather do it for other people, cause it makes me look better, but such isn't a high prio for me (already 'married with children').

Agreed. This is the best way. Soap on fingers as you described above and laminar flow.

Other methods introduce too much unnecessary complication which don't make the lenses cleaner. Any kind of absorbent material has the potential of depositing tiny fibers or other specs on the lens surface. And air drying potentially leaves behind impurities the from water.

I basically do this, but carefully pat dry with either a kleenex tissue or a clean absorbent towel to get the few droplets that inevitably haven't slid off in the not-perfectly-laminar flow.

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