Changing how eyeglass lenses are made
July 17, 2026
Key Insights
-
Prescription eyeglass lenses are made by casting plastic blanks, shipping them around the world, and grinding away up to 90% of the material to match a single pair of eyes.
-
A Northwestern University spinout is 3D printing lenses by projecting ultraviolet light into a pool of liquid resin to harden it into a finished shape.
-
The company, Azul 3D, says its printed lenses already meet optical standards. If the technology scales, it could replace global supply chains and warehouses full of blanks with 3D printers set up locally around the world.
Eyeglass lenses have been cast, shipped, and ground the same way for decades. Azul 3D is betting that UV-curable photopolymers and 3D printing offer something better
Most conventional prescription eyeglass lenses start the same way. A liquid monomer is poured between two glass molds and baked for up to 22 h. What comes out is not a finished lens but a thick plastic puck—a blank that is shipped to one of thousands of optical labs around the world. There, a technician clamps it into a grinding machine that carves away up to 90% of the material to create one person’s prescription. The rest ends up in a landfill.
Azul 3D, a start-up spun out of Chad Mirkin’s laboratory at Northwestern Chemistry, has developed a way to skip all of it—the casting, the shipping, the grinding, the waste—by 3D printing prescription lenses directly from resins cured by ultraviolet (UV) light. If it works, the technology could reshape both how and where eyeglass lenses are made.
“This is ultimately about completely changing how we think about making, storing, and distributing these types of lenses,” says Mirkin, the company’s chairman and cofounder.