About Us

Why I started VEYRO

I'm Illia. I started VEYRO because of a problem I had long before I had a brand, and still have. I just deal with it better now.

Most of my days I spend sitting at a laptop. I'm a student, which in practice means sitting down in the morning, working through material and taking notes, and getting up in the evening. Weekends and the hours after class go much the same way, except then I'm looking for ways to earn something online, because a proper job doesn't fit a timetable like mine.

After a day like that my head hums. I'd get into bed knowing exactly how tired I was and still lie there for an hour, because my eyes and my head kept going after I'd closed them. Some nights I'd wake up at 3AM for no reason I could name. A couple of times I dreamt about studying, after a full day of it, which felt like a joke at my expense.

Mornings were worse. Headache, fifteen more minutes of sleep, it'll be gone by then. It never was. You get up anyway and the first hour goes on nothing but getting your head to start. Early class made it worse.

The afternoon version I never put a name to. I only noticed it later, after reading a lot of other people describe the same thing: around 3PM, the screen gets harder to read and everything takes more out of you than it should. The 3PM crash.

The first thing I've tried

Blue light glasses went around my friends for a while, the way these things do. We all got a pair of clear lens blue light blockers.

They did very little. The picture goes slightly softer if you go looking for it, and that's the end of it. Nothing close to what I've just described. We wore them as an accessory, which is roughly what they were. After that I decided the whole category didn't work and stopped thinking about it.

Right evidence, wrong conclusion.

The tinted ones

A long time had passed when I stumbled upon some rather unusual tinted blue-light blockers and I decided to give them a try. So when I finally tried a properly tinted pair, I expected nothing again. I was wrong, and it surprised me more than I'd like to admit.

The first five minutes are odd. Everything has a colour over it and your brain needs a moment to stop noticing. But the thing that convinced me wasn't putting them on. It was taking them off. You pull them off in an ordinary room on a grey afternoon and the light goes straight into your eyes, like turning to face the sun. Until then you have no idea how much of it was being held off you.

I wore the orange pair for the first time walking back from the post office, around four in the afternoon, and it wasn't even a bright day. On, off, on again. The difference isn't subtle.

How I use them

Orange goes on around three, when that afternoon thing turns up. It's the lighter of the two and a screen stays completely usable through it, so it stays on for the rest of the day. I wear it outside as well.

Red is for the end of the evening, and for the nights I'm still working at midnight. That's where it does the most, for a reason I hadn't thought about before: a screen is harder on your eyes in a dark room than a bright one. One laptop in an unlit room at one in the morning is the worst light you'll look at all day.

I used to run Night Shift sunset to sunrise, warmest setting, brightness at the bottom, and I thought that was handled. It isn't the same thing. It isn't close.

Falling asleep got easier. That's as far as I'll put it.

What they don't do

They don't fix sleep. I'd rather say that here than let you work it out on your own.

If I've had a heavy session in the gym or played two matches in a day, I still wake up in the night. That's being worn out, and no lens has anything to do with it. These deal with light. Light is one input out of several, and the rest of your evening is still your own problem: caffeine, alcohol, eating or training before bed is still matters.

Same goes for the other two things here. My own room is properly dark, so the sleep mask only comes out when I'm sleeping somewhere that isn't my room, with a clock glowing at me or a light I can't turn off. And I've had a small notebook next to the computer for as long as I've been studying. Deadlines, plsn for the day, to-do list, notes to myself. Mostly it's a way of getting the list out of my head so it stops going round in there. Right now it's every job left on this website.

What VEYRO is

I don't make lenses and I didn't design these. I found something that worked on a problem I'd already written off, started wearing it every day, and figured other people on the same schedule would want to know the part I'd got wrong. It wasn't the category. It was the clear lenses.

That's all this is. Two lenses, one for each half of the day, with the real numbers printed next to them so you can make up your own mind.

Illia
Founder, VEYRO