A major aspect of Eva Longoria’s job as multihyphenate—actor, director, producer—in Hollywood is looking at scripts. While she’s used to scanning page after page of potential new series or motion pictures, it wasn’t until her early 40s that she started to notice a significant change in her vision—especially when she was reading late-night stories to her son.
“A couple years ago, I noticed that I was moving my phone away; I was squinting a lot, and I was making my font bigger,” Eva Longoria tells Glamour. While she used blue-light glasses and readers to help lessen the strain on her eyes, Longoria says it wasn’t until her optometrist diagnosed her with presbyopia, better known as age-related blurry close-up vision, that she was able to find some solutions that worked for her.
“I really resisted it for a long time,” Longoria says of her diagnosis. But after buying readers, she knew she needed another option to help keep her on track at work—not to mention offline while using social media or reading the news. Thankfully, she’s not alone. She notes that her friends who are in the same age range are going through the same things. “It’s pretty common. If you’re experiencing symptoms, go to your eye doctor, just get a checkup.”
But even though more than 128 million Americans have presbyopia, there’s only one FDA-approved prescription eye drop—Vuity—that improves age-related blurry near vision. So after talking with her doctor, Longoria decided to try it. She noticed enough of a difference that her experience led her to partner with Allergan, an AbbVie research and development company. “I have been taking one drop a day, and it’s really helped me see better up close," she explains. “It's really allowed me to give my reading glasses a little bit of a break. Of course with any medication you should check with your health care provider about potential side effects, whether it’s redness or headache.”
While Vuity doesn’t replace Longoria’s readers, the drops do allow her some reprieve while reading scripts or doing research for her up-and-coming podcast, Connections With Eva Longoria, which premieres on iHeart Radio on March 31. The series delves into the way the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our relationships with other people, money, sex, politics, and so much more. Longoria explains that the series was inspired by not wanting to “go back to normal.” Together with a group of experts across varying fields, she delves into these tough conversations and explores what a “healthy connection to these ideas should be.”
“I wanted to keep some habits that I established during the lockdown…and explore reconnecting with the world,” she says. “How do we reconnect as we come out of this pandemic? I’ve just heard so many people go, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t even remember how to be a coworker,’ and, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go to dinner. Like, what do I do?’ I felt like we were all a little rusty at connecting with one another.”
