Can you use a prescription from another shop?
A prescription from any hospital, eye camp or optical shop in Nepal can be used at Blurkart. It measures your eyes, not the shop. It needs SPH, CYL with AXIS, and ideally your PD. We verify it on the refractor before cutting, free, and tell you if something looks off.
People ask about using a prescription from another shop quietly, as if they are about to get in trouble. You are not. A prescription is a measurement of your eyes, not the property of whoever measured them.
Using a prescription from another shop: short answer, yes
Bring a slip from Tilganga, from Bir Hospital, from a district eye camp, from a shop in New Road, from anywhere. If it is complete and current, we will cut lenses to it. There is no charge for reading it and no pressure to be retested.
The same works in the other direction. The prescription we write is yours to take anywhere. We would rather you came back because the fitting was good than because we made leaving awkward.
What the slip needs on it
A prescription we can make up needs three things, and one more that helps a great deal.
SPH for each eye, the distance power, with a minus or plus sign. CYL if you have astigmatism, and crucially AXIS alongside it. A CYL without an AXIS is not a usable prescription, and that is the single most common problem we see on camp slips. It has to go back to whoever wrote it, because the axis cannot be guessed.
ADD if you are over about 40 and need reading power.
And the one that is often missing: PD, the distance between your pupils. Hospital slips frequently leave it out because they are prescribing, not dispensing. We measure it free in about a minute. If you want to understand what each box means, our guide to reading a prescription goes line by line.
How old is too old
Under two years and nothing noticeably changed, we will generally make it up as written. Older than two years, or if you have been squinting more, getting afternoon headaches or struggling at night, we recheck first. That recheck is free.
This is not upselling. Cutting a lens to a number your eyes have moved past means you pay for glasses that give you a headache, then pay again. Ten minutes on the refractor avoids that.
Children and teenagers are the exception to every timeline. A slip more than a year old for anyone under 18 gets rechecked as a matter of course, because that is the age when powers move fastest.
What we check before cutting
Even on a current slip, we do a quick verification. We put the numbers up on the refractor and confirm you actually see well with them. It takes a couple of minutes and it catches three things: a transcription error on the slip, a power that has drifted since it was written, and an axis that was recorded the wrong way round.
If something looks off we tell you and explain what we found, rather than silently making a different pair than the one you asked for. Your slip, your call.
Contact lenses are different
This one catches people out. A glasses prescription is not enough to order contact lenses. A lens sits directly on your eye, so it also needs a base curve and a diameter, which a glasses test never measures. If your slip only has glasses numbers, you need a contact lens fitting before ordering. That is free here too.
The powers are not always identical either. Strong prescriptions in particular need adjusting for the fact that a contact lens sits on the eye rather than twelve millimetres in front of it.
Bringing it in
Photograph every slip you are given, the moment you are given it. Prescriptions get lost between the hospital and the shop constantly, and a clear phone photo is enough for us to work from. You can WhatsApp it ahead of an order rather than making the trip twice.
Both showrooms have an optician on site: Situngah Galli, Pulchowk in Lalitpur, and the main road opposite KFC in Boudha. Browse prescription frames from NPR 999 and bring whatever paperwork you have.
If you were told your prescription only works there
You were told wrong. There is no lock on a prescription and no shop owns your numbers. If somewhere refuses to write the figures down after testing you, that is a reason to be careful about the rest of the transaction, not a rule you have to accept. Ask for the slip before you decide where to buy. Any shop confident in its fitting and pricing will hand it over without a fuss.
Frequently asked
- Will you charge me for using an outside prescription?
- No. We read it, verify it on the refractor and measure your PD at no cost, whether the slip came from a hospital, an eye camp or another shop.
- How old can a prescription be?
- Under two years is usually fine if nothing has changed. Older than that we recheck first, free, because making lenses to a stale number wastes your money rather than ours.
- Arko pasal ko prescription yahaan chalchha?
- Chalchha. Prescription bhaneko tapai ko aankha ko naap ho, pasal ko samaan hoina. Hospital, eye camp ya jun pasal bata bhaye pani lyaunus, hami refractor ma check garera lens banai dinchhau.