Dear Readers,

I joined the company before 1979 so I have had the pleasure and benefit of following the development of Points de Vue magazine over these last thirty years.

Without wishing to re-write its history and to be brief, this magazine began in French and in black and white. Today it comes in four bilingual versions, all in four-colour, French/German, English/Spanish, English/Chinese and English/Brazilian Portuguese.

Through the magazine, professionals, from many different backgrounds, ophthalmologists, researchers, optometrists and opticians, have been able to express themselves freely on a whole variety of subjects from pure ophthalmic medicine through to “Art and Vision”. I have used the word background to illustrate the fact that our authors have come from 26 different countries.

As ex-Managing Director of the Group I am also delighted that this magazine has contributed to building bridges between the various professionals involved in vision correction, since it is read by about 50% ophthalmologists, 46% optometrists/opticians and 4% vision science researchers.

Although the aim of this magazine has never been to compete with the benchmark scientific publications, it does have a strong Scientific Committee that acts as the perfect guide and arbitrator as to the content of the articles included.

My wish has always been to see the magazine act as a building block in strengthening Essilor’s technical and scientific image worldwide and to contribute to the information and even the training of many professionals. In this respect we have been extremely satisfied to see several of its articles selected, in countries where in-service training is organised, to give “points” to professionals who could prove that they had read the article in question.

In addition to this, for many years now the “Art and Vision” section has meant that lots of readers keep a collection of the magazine and curiously these include not only ophthalmology and optics professors, but also professors at Art Schools.

It should be noted that for a magazine produced by an ophthalmic optics company, this type of publication is absolutely unique and would appear to meet real needs since circulation has been continually on the increase over the past few decades, reaching a record of 38,500 copies of the last issue which was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Varilux!

I am keen to see Points de Vue continue to develop and to see new bilingual versions produced in the coming years. We have always believed that this gift that our subsidiary directors give to our customers worldwide is one of the best ways of thanking them for their loyalty.