“It’s a dual mechanism of action,” says Dr. What Vuity does is kick both of those muscles (the one that shrinks your pupil and the one that bends your lens) into gear. Fast forward to that time of life when you have to hold the votive candle up to the menu - by then your lens is stiffer and so doesn’t refract as much, which means you can’t focus up close and things look blurry. There’s also another tiny muscle that opens and closes your pupil, to allow the light in. Let me back up a sec and explain how eyes ideally work: When you’re young, the lens of your eye is flexible, and refracts when light enters it a little muscle helps it to change shape as you focus on stuff that’s far away or up close. So as soon as Vuity got approved, I signed up to try it. I hate using my greasy black fingers to put my reading glasses on and off when I need to loosen a screw or whatever, and the worst is when they fall into the oily bilge water. The bilge is hot and dark and grimy, and I often need to hang upside-down like a bat to see inside the engine and figure out what isn’t connecting or what’s clogged up. The biggest reason I want to ditch reading glasses is because I spend a lot of time fixing things on my boat. The research that led to Vuity's FDA approval in October looked promising: A statistically significant percentage of users gained three lines on an up-close reading chart, without losing distance vision, according to clinical trials on 750 patients between ages 40 and 55. So when I read about Vuity (while holding my phone two feet away from my face with the print enlarged), I was psyched! These drops are designed to address presbyopia, so users can see things up close without those glasses displayed on a rack at the drugstore. In fact, around 90% of people over age 45 has some degree of presbyopia, according to research. I have 20/20 vision otherwise, so dealing with glasses is new to me - my presbyopia, which is a gradual loss of the ability to focus on things that are close up - began in my 40s.

They are incredibly annoying, and I never have a pair handy when I need them, even though between the two of us, we have readers on every surface in our home. There is one aspect of getting older that I’m not fine with, however: reading glasses. I’m 53, and don’t care that I have grays on what hair I have left or that I prefer hanging out at home with my wonderful, brilliant, desirable girlfriend (who, ahem, covers health at Good Housekeeping) to partying all night like I did in my 20s. In most ways, I’m fine with getting older.

Lulu chu a handy break up