You lost your prescription. Now what?

This is the most common reason people go looking for their prescription, and the most avoidable. Here is how to recover it, and what to make sure the copy actually contains.

Who has a copy

• The optician or optometrist who tested you. The obvious first call, and usually the fastest. Practices keep clinical records for years — often a decade or more — so even an old test is likely still on file.
• Wherever you bought the glasses, if that was somewhere else. They needed the prescription to make the lenses, so they have it.
• Any online retailer you have ordered from. The order history often includes the values you entered.
• The glasses themselves. Any optician can measure the lenses you are wearing on a focimeter and read the prescription back out in a couple of minutes. It is not identical to a fresh eye test — it tells you what you were given, not what you now need — but it recovers the numbers.

Ask for everything, not just the numbers

A recovered prescription is often trimmed to the bare minimum. Ask specifically for:

• SPH, CYL and AXIS for both eyes
• The ADD, if you have one
• Your PD — routinely omitted, and required to order online
• Any prism and base — easy to lose and impossible to reconstruct later
• The date, which is what makes it useful as history rather than just a number

Is an old prescription still usable?

For ordering lenses, most countries treat a prescription as valid for around two years, less for children. Beyond that an optician will normally ask for a current test. For understanding how your eyes have changed, though, an old prescription never expires — it is the only record of where you were.

The version that does not get lost

Paper prescriptions are handed over once, at the end of an appointment, on a day you were mostly thinking about frames. RefraCard exists because that is a bad system of record: store each one as you get it, photograph the paper alongside it, and the next time anyone asks, it is on your phone.