Eye Exams: Your eyes are magnificent feats of biological engineering.

Your eyes do a lot.

They focus, adapt, filter, and translate light into the world you move through every day, from screens and street signs to faces across a room.

This page is a closer look at what happens in an eye exam at Cubitts, how vision works and why eye health matters. You’ll find straightforward guidance on our Standard and Advanced examinations hear from our optometrists and explore the anatomy of the eye.

Part practical, part curious. Everything here is designed to help you understand your eyes a little better, and look after them for the long run.

Beauty is the eye of the beholder.⁠

⁠Eye Examinations are available in most Cubitts stores, with our optometrists who are here for eye health, not for selling things.⁠

We offer two types of eye examination; Routine and Enhanced.

There are no stupid questions when it comes to your eyes

The human eye is a compact optical system that turns light into perception with astonishing efficiency.  In a fraction of a second, it bends incoming light, regulates how much enters, refines it into a focused image, and converts that image into electrical signals the brain can interpret. 

Light reflected off objects enters the eye and is refracted into a sharp pattern on the retina, much as a camera forms an image on film or a sensor. The retina then translates that pattern into electrical impulses, which travel along the optic nerve to the brain, where specialised regions extract features such as edges, contrast, motion, and colour, and assemble them into a coherent scene. What feels like immediate seeing is, in practice, rapid measurement and interpretation: optics upstream, neural computation downstream, stitched together so seamlessly that the mechanics disappear.

What makes it so fascinating is the layered collaboration: transparent tissues, tiny muscles, elastic supports, light-sensitive cells, and neural circuits all working in sequence so that the world arrives not as brightness, but as meaning.

• Cornea
. The cornea is the eye’s clear front window; it takes the first share of the light and bends it inward. Tough, transparent, and quietly hardworking, it sets the whole journey in motion.
• Pupil. 
The pupil is a simple opening, dark as a well. It widens to welcome the night and tightens in bright sun, letting in only what the moment can bear.
• Iris
. The iris is the coloured ring that does the governing, a living shutter with a steady hand. Its tiny muscles adjust the pupil, balancing clarity with protection.
• Suspensory ligaments
. Fine suspensory ligaments hold the lens in place like taut threads on a stage. They pass the pull and release that lets the lens change shape, bringing the world into focus.
• Lens
. The lens is the eye’s quiet adjuster, reshaping itself to sharpen near and far. It turns scattered light into a crisp image, as if drawing the scene into order.
• Vitreous body
. The vitreous body is a clear gel that fills the eye and keeps its form. It is mostly water, yet it holds everything steady, like calm air in a sealed room.
• Rods and cones. 
Rods and cones are the retina’s watchers: rods for dim light and motion, cones for colour and fine detail. Together they translate light into signals the body can carry.
• Brain
. The brain receives those signals and makes them meaningful, stitching them into a world you can recognise. Seeing is not just light entering the eye; it is the mind deciding what it is looking at.
• Primary visual cortex
. In the primary visual cortex, the brain begins its first careful reading of the image. Here edges, lines, and patterns are mapped and measured, the raw grammar of sight.