Are you seeing comfortably?

5 things you may not know about Paul Gill

1. He was born in Donnybrook, lives in Sandycove, and walks or cycles to work.
2. He has two daughters and two sons, and is a grandfather, ‘which is life-changing’. His son Jamie works in the business.
3. He ‘found’ Dalkey by chance. While working in Cork after qualifying, he took a drive around the country to look for suitable premises, and hit upon his shop in St Patrick’s Road. ‘It was a happy, lucky strike’.
4. He sails. He used to have a catamaran that he sailed around Westport, Waterford, West Cork, Belfast Lough and Blessington.
5. He plays indoor football, in Bray.

Paul Gill Opticians has been based in Dalkey for thirty years, delivering professional eye-care along with designer frames and sunglasses you might struggle to find elsewhere.

Paul himself is a stylish advertisement for his shop, debonair in his ‘very nichey’ Oliver Peoples glasses, and proficient at helping people find ‘something that works’.

Often he’s selling products specific to situations. ‘People are more educated now about what’s available than they were ten years ago’, he says. ‘Especially people who are into sports - sailing, cycling, hillwalking, snowboarding, fishing. About a quarter of our customers would fall into this category. They know what technology is on offer and they come in looking for niche products, such as Oakley or Maui Jim. Some of our Oakley sunglasses for instance come with three different lenses than clip in and out of the frame – there’s a dark lens for intensely bright conditions, a sodium yellow lens that enhances sunset conditions and improves contrast, and a third lens for normal daylight conditions.’

For those of us ordinarily interested in better vision while going about our daily lives, a visit to the optician is still informative, as the technology is always moving forward. Take spectacle lenses – did you know you can now get lenses designed to cope with looking from paperwork to a computer screen and back again? Or that you can get contact lenses with a UV filter built in, potentially protective against macular degeneration? Or supernaturally bendy stainless steel frames, made without screws and so pliable ‘you can sit on them’?

Every manufacturer in the eyewear business seems to have its own ‘thing’. Lindberg leads the way in rimless technology. The big butch display of Tag products shouts ‘for the men’, while Paul’s sparkling cabinet of Chanel is for fashionistas – and twice a year a mystery shopper from Chanel visits to check that its stringent standards of presentation are being upheld. Another fashion-forward name is the French brand Dilem (inspired by the idea of ‘dilemma’) – their spectacles have snap-on side arms for adaptable coordination with your outfit du jour.

For consistent levels of innovation, Paul thinks the standout nations are Germany and Denmark. Stylewise, retro is fashionable just now, and the American brand Oliver Peoples offers ‘the kind of shapes your uncle might have worn 60 years ago’, but made with the finesse of today. ‘I think the results are very easy on the eye’, he adds, modelling a couple of pairs. Discreet branding is apparently part of the Oliver Peoples appeal, keeping the designs recognisable ‘only to those in the know’ according to its brochure, which pinpoints its core customer as ‘a confident intellectual with a progressive sense of style’.

What about ‘ready readers’ though, now available everywhere and worn at times even by stylish, confident intellectuals? Ready readers are OK, says Paul – he does stock them – but advises that if you combine wearing them with bypassing regular eye tests, you might go unaware of conditions the eye test is designed to pick up, such as glaucoma, cataract and macular degeneration.

Surgery for cataracts is on the increase. ‘People are living longer, and the number of people having cataract surgery is just ridiculous,’ he observes. ‘And not all of them are that old – the youngest one I know is a guy of 38.’ As for macular degeneration, which we seem to hear a lot about these days, this is a ‘multi-factorial’ problem in which diet, genetics, and smoking may all play a part. For every customer over 40, the eye test Paul offers includes a risk analysis for macular degeneration, developed in tandem with Waterford-based Stephen Beatty, a leading expert affiliated with researchers at Trinity College.

As everyone knows, precision eyewear isn’t cheap. ‘The mood of the country just now is that everything can be got cheaper, and yes, you can go for something cheap’, says Paul, ‘but then you get a bland, generic product. People might pull a face when presented with an optician’s bill for €370, say, but I really believe you get exactly what you pay for. For that money you can get something technically excellent and aesthetically refined. People might spend €10 a day on coffee and a bagel every day of the year without thinking about it, and that adds up to €3,650 - so it’s worth seeing the money in perspective’.

While some of Paul’s customers come in looking for new technology in their eyewear, others are clinging to solutions that worked for them ten years ago and are reluctant to look at other options – ‘people can tend to get “stuck on a rock” while the tide goes out around them’, he says. In particular, he’d like to see more people giving contact lenses a go. ‘I think people have been daunted over the years by misinformation about contact lenses. They have misgivings about discomfort, hygiene, solutions, chemicals, infections – but the one-day disposables are really so good, I think that almost anyone these days is potentially a contact lens wearer. It just takes about a week to get used to them. A lot of suppliers give us trial sets of lenses so that people can try them out against what they already have, and we find that people are delighted with them.’

His top tips for your eye health?

‘My number one tip is to appreciate it. People take vision as a given, but it isn’t. Loss of vision is a very traumatic thing.

Second, wear the right product for the right environment. We offer solutions for all sorts of situations. People can say I’m only trying to sell them more things, but I genuinely think people should be taking advantage of the technologies that could be helping them.

And third, have an eye test every two years’.