Your glasses hurt behind the ears or on the nose bridge. Here is why

A well-fitted pair of glasses should be something you forget you are wearing. If you are taking them off through the day to rub a sore spot, the frame is not fitted to you. That is a fixable problem, and in most cases it costs nothing to fix.

Each pressure point has its own cause. Work out which one you have.

Pain behind the ears

A frame should carry most of its weight on the bridge of your nose, with the temples resting lightly along the sides of your head and curving down behind the ear to stop it sliding forward. They are stabilisers, not clamps.

Soreness behind the ear usually means one of three things. The temples are too tight and squeezing inward. The bend where the temple curves down is in the wrong place, so the frame is pressing rather than resting. Or the frame is too narrow for your head, which forces the arms to bow outward and then grip.

Heavy lenses make all of this worse. A strong prescription in a thick material puts real weight at the front, and the temples end up compensating for it.

A dent or soreness on the nose bridge

If the nose pads or bridge are digging in, the frame is either too heavy for its contact area, sitting too low, or the pads are angled wrong so the edge is loading instead of the flat surface.

This is common with a low or flat nose bridge, which many Filipino wearers have. A frame designed for a higher bridge slides down until it wedges, and the narrow part of the bridge ends up carrying the load. The fix is either a frame with a low wide bridge or adjustable pads set properly by an optician.

Green or grey marks alongside the dent point to metal pads reacting with skin and sweat, not to fit alone.

Pressure at the temples or a headache across the sides

The frame is too narrow. The front is wider than your face allows, so the arms squeeze the sides of your head all day. This produces a band-like ache that people often blame on their prescription.

Worth separating: pressure pain is felt on the outside, on the skin and bone. Prescription strain is usually felt behind or around the eyes and gets worse with close work. If yours is the second kind, it is an eye test you need, not an adjustment.

What you can do yourself, and what you should not

Do bring them in. Do keep them in a case rather than on your head, which is what stretches temples out of shape in the first place. Do rinse sweat and sebum off the pads, because Philippine heat means salt builds up fast.

Do not bend the frame yourself. Acetate needs to be warmed before it moves, and cold acetate snaps. Metal has a limited number of bends in it before it fatigues and fails at the hinge. A five-minute adjustment at the counter is free. A broken frame is not.

When the real answer is lighter lenses

If you have a strong prescription and the frame has been adjusted properly and still leaves marks, the weight is the problem, not the fit. Thinner, lighter lens material reduces the load at the bridge and takes the strain off the temples. This is the one fix an adjustment cannot deliver.

Visit a Vision Express store

Bring the pair in and let the team look at it on your face. Free lifetime custom fitting and adjustment means the temple angle, the bend position, the pad angle and the frame width can all be corrected properly, as many times as you need, for as long as you own the glasses. Free lifetime ultrasonic cleaning will also lift the build-up off the pads while you wait.

If the weight of your lenses is what is causing the pressure, book a Vision7 eye test first so we are working from your current prescription, then ask for Tokai BIR-W at the counter. It is a thinner Japanese material, so a strong grade comes out lighter and slimmer and stops loading your nose bridge. For the highest prescriptions, ask about Tokai HR-W instead, the thinnest option on our lens menu.

Both come with a one-year warranty and free lifetime servicing, and your optician can advise which suits your frame.