Photo: These Lenses Can Slow the Progression of Nearsightedness
While Europe and Asia have had Stellest glasses for years, the FDA finally approved them for the U.S. in 2025.
Essilor's new Stellest lenses—approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September 2025—promise to slow nearsightedness in children. They use concentric lenslets to redirect light and reduce myopia progression by up to 70 percent over two years, according to company data.
The lenses are already used across Europe and Asia. The FDA threshold for "reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness" tends to be especially high, which likely prolonged the review.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please to post comments
Only children?
Not unusual for a treatment to work correctively during development but be ineffective in older adults and vice versa.
The condition "presbyopia" specifically means "Old eyes" or "Elder sight" and connotes the stiffening of the lenses of the eyes with age. A/The treatment VIZZ was approved in July.
Presumably, softening the lenses of eyes whose lenses have not yet stiffened would not produce the desired corrective outcome.
Oh, I see.
Which one is nearsightedness?
The one where you save your bazooka joe points to see the bones in your hands only to discover that the glasses don't see through women's clothing.
Farsightedness is the one where the world ends and you're left with nothing to entertain you but the entirety of the Library of Congress, and then you accidentally break your glasses.
It’s not fair!
This is going to tick off big eyecare.
Wear glasses to keep from wearing glasses?
Are we not going to discuss why nearsightedness is so prevalent nowadays?
Masturbation?
Reason: "If only government were more speedy and rational, everything would be much better."