Two eyecare professionals have seen the design and development of Tokai Optical’s lenses first-hand, including its latest HR and HR-W single-vision range. They tell Insight why they are happy to promote them for patients, and even friends and family.
Simone Liewes can’t talk right now.
She’s unwell, confined to her home and unable to speak, so no chance of an interview with Insight about Japanese optical company Tokai Optical’s latest range of lenses.
A voice she may not have at the moment, but there is passion aplenty in the answers she supplies to written questions.
Passion for her industry, passion for her role as a “dispenser and fitter” at Victoria practice Eyes on Dromana, passion for patients.
And a healthy respect for the passion of those behind Tokai’s engineering and products, including its latest range – the HR (High Resolution) and HR-W single-vision lenses.
As Liewes practically screams in her replies to our questions – I LOVE GLASSES.
She has since childhood, proudly wearing them at school when others would shrink from the slings and arrows of childish taunts.
“I have been collecting glasses since before I started working in optics and rotate through my collection almost daily,” she says.
That love was reciprocated when she happened upon a role in optics.
“My ex-husband worked with a guy who’s dad was best mates with the optical mechanic at a small independent practice,” says Liewes.
“They had heard on the grapevine that they were looking for an apprentice, ideally a mature one.
“My boys were both in school and I was looking to get back into the workforce, so one day I popped in, just to introduce myself – the owner took one look at me and said ‘I love your glasses, you’ve got the job’.”
If the rest is history, Liewes discovered that a big part of her future would revolve around Tokai – its lenses and optical coatings.
Like her, Tokai was then relatively new to the Australian market. But when she tried her first Tokai lenses, it was, well, literally love at first sight.
“Being someone who was new to optics at the time and as someone who only wears single-vision lenses I was very much in the mindset of ‘oh it’s a single-vision lens, how much difference could there be?’.
“I could not believe the difference in clarity.”
Now it is Tokai and Tokai only that she wears.
“Since wearing the Lutina lens combined with a mix of their amazing tints, I will not wear anything else,” she says.
“My current favourite is a tie between my Lutina with Double Rose tint and Lutina with Pink Fine Colour.”
That goes for her family and friends as well.
Liewes is still getting up to speed with the HR and HR-W lenses, because they are relatively new to Australian practices.
But she remembers well one particular patient she fitted with the lenses – “the only patient that has ever made me tear up”.
“She had advanced Parkinson’s and two stimulating implants in her head. Unfortunately, one of these was placed a little too close to her optic nerve resulting in significant prismatic vision.
“She had a pair of glasses that were simply unwearable due to her mobility and posture – they were far too heavy and would slide straight off her face.
“She wanted a fun, lightweight, funky frame that would hide her significant prescription, but putting in the perfect lens was the important bit.
“I went with Tokai,” says Liewes.
“Her speech wasn’t the best due to her condition, but I will never forget her reaction – I put the glasses on her face, she broke out in a huge smile, then, without saying a word she just walked out our front door to go and look at the horizon. “Both myself and her husband could not stop smiling.
“If that isn’t testament to the power of a well-made lens then I don’t know what is.”
It helps that Liewes has also witnessed for herself, how well made those lenses are.
She says a recent trip to Tokai’s Japan factory was “eye-opening and heartwarming – to see and hear firsthand the passion and commitment of the engineers involved in product development”.
“They pride themselves on their uniqueness in the market, so much so that their company motto around promoting customer first and originality is displayed in every single room throughout the facility.”
Liewes says that makes her “proud to be able to promote and offer their products”.
She admits she doesn’t always understand the complexity of the technology behind the company’s lenses and coatings, but she believes and loves the results she sees for herself – for her friends, family and her patients.
A focus on the fovea
Tokai says that technology means that the HR and HR-W lenses are not just a premium single-vision lens but a different category of single-vision altogether.
Justin Chiang is the company’s Australia general manager.
He says that rather than treating vision as a static, centred task, the HR concept began with a deeper question: how does the eye actually behave when we look around, move, and track the world.
Development focused on the fovea centralis, the tiny, highly specialised region of the macula responsible for the sharpest vision.
“While small in size, its significance is enormous,” says Chiang.
“It is where we perceive the greatest detail, the highest contrast, and the clearest motion.
“But the fovea is not positioned on the visual axis. It sits slightly off to the temporal side.
“This means that when the eye rotates, the direction in which light must travel to reach this point is not perfectly aligned with the optical centre of a typical lens.”
He says traditionally single-vision lenses assume the optical centre of the lens and the eye’s rotation centre line up.
“That assumption works only when the wearer looks straight ahead. Once they look sideways – examining a mirror, checking a blind spot, following a child running across a playground, or scanning multiple screens – the eyes naturally rotate, and clarity breaks down.”
Chiang says the Tokai design addresses this mismatch by redirecting transmitted light so that it reaches the foveal region more effectively.
The HR lens “expanded the area of crisp peripheral clarity and supported the eye’s natural preference for smooth pursuit – tracking objects with the eyes instead of relying on head movement”.
He says the company has improved on this with the HR-W lens.
“HR-W applies aspheric optimisation to both the front and back surfaces,” says Chiang.
“This dual-surface architecture gives HR-W the ability to control peripheral aberrations with far greater precision, allowing clarity to remain consistent as the eyes move horizontally or vertically.
Also, the HR-W lens adapts to different lifestyle needs, with different designs, he says.
“One version maximises clarity and visual stability across the widest field, preferred by active users and drivers.
“Another design supports enhanced comfort at near vision, taking into account the larger rotational movements the eye performs during close work and digital engagement.
“A third design also yields a slimmer profile, offering a cosmetic advantage particularly noticeable in higher prescriptions – something that many dispensing opticians immediately appreciate when fitting fashion-forward or rimless frames.”
Greater clarity at the edges
Among those appreciative practitioners is Kevin Li, an optical dispenser/supervisor at the University of Canberra’s student-led optometry clinic.
He can attest to how the HR and HR-W lenses deliver greater clarity in peripheral vision and with fewer aberrations, especially in patients with higher prescriptions.
Like Liewes, he took a bit of a roundabout route to the optics industry, starting his working life fixing TVs, videos, microwaves and stereos, before filling a temporary role for a friend and optometry practice owner.
Li grew to enjoy the work, and when a full-time role came up a couple of years later, he jumped at the chance for a career change.
Many years on, he is the one helping to introduce new people to careers in optical dispensing and optometry.
As part of that he supervises students working with patients at the university’s optometry clinic, and does plenty of dispensing himself.
And when many of his high-script patients complain of issues with peripheral vision and a lack of clarity, often it’s the Tokai HR or HR-W lens that he will reach for.
“As you go up in your prescription, visually, most people will find they have a lot of aberrations towards the side of the lenses,” he says.
“All of my patients that have had HR lenses have said they’ve physically gone, they can see a lot and it doesn’t matter which part of the lens they look through, it is crystal clear.”
Because the clinic is run by the university, Li’s judgements are driven primarily by patient-outcomes rather than any need to make a profit.
That means he is always focused on what is the best lens for the patient.
He believes Tokai shares that thinking.
“The work ethic and the philosophy about the lens itself is very much about let’s give patients the best lenses we can humanly, possibly make, without the price tag that goes with it.”
Li says that allows him to offer premium, high-end “Mercedes Benz-like” lenses at the cost of a much cheaper model.
What’s not to love.
