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How to Find Your PD for a Warby Parker Order

When you order prescription glasses from Warby Parker, you'll be asked to submit your pupillary distance along with your prescription. If you've never come across the term, that's normal — PD isn't something most people hear about until they're buying glasses online for the first time. Here's what it means and how to get yours.

What PD is and why Warby Parker wants it

Pupillary distance is the distance between the centers of your two pupils, in millimeters. It's used to center each lens correctly in the frame, so the optical sweet spot lines up with where your eyes actually point. Warby Parker uses it to make sure your lenses sit right; without it, even a perfectly correct prescription can feel slightly off.

There's no single "normal" value — it varies a lot from person to person. Warby Parker puts the adult average somewhere around 60 to 64mm, but yours being outside that range doesn't mean anything is wrong.

Single vs. dual PD

You might see PD written two ways:

Either works for a standard Warby Parker order. The one exception is reading glasses, which use near PD: subtract 3mm from your single PD, or 1.5mm from each eye on a dual PD.

Where to find yours

A few routes, from most to least official:

  1. Check your prescription. PD is sometimes printed on it, though not always — in some regions it's classified as a dispensing measurement rather than part of the prescription itself, so your provider isn't always required to include it.
  2. Ask your eye doctor. If it wasn't written down, the office can usually give it to you, and a measurement taken with a pupillometer during an exam is the most accurate you'll get.
  3. Look at your current glasses. The three numbers printed inside one arm are lens width, bridge width, and arm length — not your PD, but useful for frame sizing. (Your PD still has to come from one of the other methods.)
  4. Measure it yourself. The route most online shoppers take.

Warby Parker's own PD tool uses a photo with a magnetic-stripe card held under your nose for scale, and their iOS app can measure it using the iPhone's TrueDepth depth camera. Both are solid — they're just two different ways of giving the camera something to calibrate against.

Measuring without a card

Our PD measurement tool works a little differently: it uses the iris itself as the size reference, since the human iris is remarkably consistent in diameter across adults. That means no card, no ruler, and no app to download — just your device's camera. It returns both the single and dual numbers, ready to paste into Warby Parker's order form.

One honest caveat

Any at-home method, including the big retailers' own tools, is an estimate rather than a clinical measurement. For most single-vision orders a millimeter or two of variation is harmless. If you're ordering progressives or a strong prescription, it's worth measuring a few times and, ideally, confirming against a real exam when you can. Measure twice, order once.

Sources

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