Blue light glasses fix what's hitting your eyes. A spreadsheet tells you what's actually happening behind them, and after three years of remote development work, I trust the second one a lot more. This is the log from a 90-day iGenics trial, tracked inside the same fatigue spreadsheet I run every developer eye care experiment through, built to cut through digital eye strain guesswork during long coding sessions.
Quick disclosure, since money is part of this: some of the links below are affiliate links, and if you buy through one I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I'm not an optometrist or any kind of medical professional — just a developer who got tired of paying for eye fatigue in lost coding hours and decided to treat it like a debugging problem instead of a mystery.
The short version, if you don't want the whole log: my fatigue score dropped from an 8.2 baseline to a 4.3 by the time the 90 days wrapped, which is a real shift and not a rounding error. Everything below is the tracking method behind that one number, plus what I'd tell anyone about to run the same experiment on themselves.
The Spreadsheet Behind the 90-Day iGenics Test
This round of tracking centered on iGenics, living inside the same fatigue spreadsheet I've kept running for fourteen months — a color-coded tracker with a column for a daily fatigue score out of ten, headache frequency, a rough blink-rate impression, supplement cost, and hours logged on screen. I'm not chasing precision so much as a trend line I can actually trust, the same way you'd instrument a slow endpoint before guessing at a fix.
Part of why I bother at all is that Computer Vision Syndrome is a productivity problem as much as a comfort one. For a freelancer, squinting through the afternoon is billable time evaporating, and I've written before about managing that late-afternoon eye fatigue wall without much luck from hardware alone. Cheap clip-on blue light glasses ordered off Amazon were my first attempt, and they did roughly nothing for the ache behind my eyes by mid-afternoon — filtering light at the lens doesn't touch whatever's happening further back. I kept my desk setup, monitor heights, and viewing distances frozen for the entire window so the spreadsheet reflected the capsule and nothing else.
Why Early Data Doesn't Mean Anything Yet
Biology doesn't refresh like a dev server. Change a CSS property and you see the result instantly; a supplement working its way into your system on a useful timescale is a much higher-latency process, and the first stretch of any trial tends to look flat no matter what's actually shifting underneath. That's the single biggest reason people quit early and call a product useless, and it's part of why my running ranking of eye supplements keeps getting revised.
Extending a normal 30-day test out to a full quarter, using the same tracking method, is really the only way to catch a trend a shorter trial would smooth right over. None of that touches the wider blue light mitigation argument, or how lutein and zeaxanthin ratios actually play out on a screen-heavy schedule, or the case for cycling supplements instead of running one straight through — those are separate rabbit holes for another log. I also left my ingredient checklist alone mid-protocol, and treated dry eye and general fatigue as two different problems worth tracking separately rather than one blurry symptom. Absorption, and how well any of this actually gets used by your system, is its own topic. The 20-20-20 rule, for what it's worth, was already part of my day long before iGenics entered the picture.
iGenics by the Numbers: Baseline to Day 90
My baseline going in was an 8.2 out of 10 by the end of a coding day — sanded-cornea grit, a headache that showed up like clockwork, the whole set. The three-bottle stack ran somewhere in the low three figures total, call it seventy-ish a bottle, a fair chunk of change for a bet that might do nothing. By the close of the 90-day window, that average had dropped to a 4.3, a roughly 48 percent reduction, and I'd calculated something like seven and a half extra productive coding hours a week that used to go to staring at the ceiling waiting for a headache to pass.
The clearest proof wasn't a spreadsheet cell, though — it was standing at a Friday standup, reading text off the whiteboard across the room without the half-second of refocusing I used to need. Even the sit-stand desk seemed to notice the shift; the motor sticks a little every time it kicks in after three straight hours in the seated position, and somewhere in this stretch I caught myself standing up out of habit rather than out of eye strain. By then I'd stopped fully trusting my own read on a given day, which is exactly why I ended up weighing my optometrist's skepticism against my own spreadsheet and let the iGenics numbers, not a passing mood, make the call.
Is the Improvement Real, or Just Noticing Less?
A friend of mine who spends weekends brewing craft IPAs in the garage swears the same supplement fixed his eyes practically overnight. That is the kind of anecdote I do not trust, because it is not measured against anything. My spreadsheet exists specifically to catch the difference between an actual drop in strain and simply paying less attention because I have gotten used to the discomfort.
The way I check for myself: I look for the trend to hold across a rolling average measured over many days, not a single good day, and I check whether the improvement shows up somewhere I do not control for — a demo call, a standup, a late deploy — not just when I am already primed to notice it. That is a decision rule, not a diagnosis, and if your own numbers move the wrong direction instead, that is a conversation for a professional, not a spreadsheet column.
Weighing iGenics Against VisiFlora and TheyaVue
iGenics earned its numbers here — a 48 percent drop in fatigue is not a rounding error, and the twelve-ingredient formula did what it said it would do inside my window. But the next spreadsheet I run will not use it. I am switching to VisiFlora for the next 90-day cycle specifically because it is built around the gut-eye connection rather than a straight vision-ingredient stack, and given how much environment and diet already seem to move my numbers around, that dual-action approach fits where I want to take the tracking next.
If budget is the deciding factor rather than the approach, TheyaVue is the cheaper entry point of the three and a reasonable place to start a first spreadsheet of your own. It just isn't built for the more specific problem I'm chasing at this point, which is why it isn't the one I'm carrying forward.
Rules for Running Your Own Eye Fatigue Log
A few rules from this log translate directly if you want to run your own version. Budget for the full quarter up front — a single bottle won't tell you anything, and the total cost lands in the low three figures whether you commit to it or bail after one bottle and waste the rest. Do not touch the trend line until the second half of the window; the first stretch is close to meaningless no matter which supplement is being tested. Track something you cannot easily talk yourself into believing — a headache count, a cost log, a hard number — rather than a vague sense of feeling better, because the vague sense is exactly what a placebo effect exploits. Keep one thing constant while everything else moves: for me that was desk setup; for you it might be screen brightness or sleep schedule, but pick something and freeze it.
This same spreadsheet is coming along for the VisiFlora run next, mostly to see whether the gut-eye framing moves the number any further than a straight ingredient stack did. Whatever you land on, run the log before you trust the result — a fatigue score you tracked yourself beats a testimonial every time, and if anything gets worse instead of better, that is a conversation for a professional, not a spreadsheet.
Important: Nothing on this website constitutes medical advice. All content is based on my personal experience as a developer and my own independent research. Consult a licensed eye care professional for guidance specific to your vision.