Malaysian Pupillary Distance (PD) by Race and Gender
Pupillary Distance (PD) is the distance in millimetres between the centres of your two pupils. Opticians use it to line up the optical centre of each lens with the pupil — get the PD wrong and even a perfect prescription causes eye strain, blurred peripheral vision, and headaches.
We pulled the PD measurements submitted by 124 Malaysian customers when ordering prescription eyewear from 100glasses, and broke the numbers down by ethnicity and gender. To our knowledge, this is the first public dataset of its kind for Malaysia.
The headline numbers
Across all 124 Malaysian adults in the sample:
- Mean PD: 61.7 mm
- Median PD: 62 mm
- Interquartile range (25th–75th percentile): 60–65 mm
- Range: 40–73 mm
- Standard deviation: 5.4 mm
Most optical frames are designed around a PD of 58–68 mm. That's basically the middle 80% of Malaysian adult buyers. If you're in that band, you have a lot of options. If you're not, frame selection gets fussy fast.
PD by gender
| Gender | n | Mean (mm) | Median (mm) | P25–P75 | Min–Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male | 48 | 63.3 | 64 | 61–67 | 48–73 |
| Female | 69 | 60.5 | 62 | 59–63 | 40–72 |
Malaysian men in our sample average 2.8 mm wider PD than women. That lines up with what international optometry literature says, which usually puts the gap at 2–3 mm. The reason is boring: men have bigger skulls on average, so the eyes sit further apart.
PD by ethnicity
| Ethnicity | n | Mean (mm) | Median (mm) | P25–P75 | Min–Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Malay | 50 | 62.3 | 63 | 60–66 | 40–73 |
| Chinese | 45 | 60.9 | 62 | 60–64 | 47–68 |
| Indian | 6 | 61.5 | 63 | 62–63 | 52–66 |
| Lain-lain | 23 | 62.1 | 63 | 58–66 | 40–73 |
The medians sit between 62 and 63 mm. That's within a millimetre of each other. Honestly, I expected a bigger gap going in. Ethnicity turns out to be a much weaker signal than gender. The Lain-lain bucket has the widest spread, which makes sense because it lumps together Iban, Kadazan, Bidayuh, Bajau, and foreign residents in one group.
PD by ethnicity and gender combined
| Group | n | Mean (mm) | Median (mm) | P25–P75 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Malay — Male | 21 | 63.8 | 64 | 61–67 |
| Malay — Female | 28 | 61 | 62 | 59–64 |
| Chinese — Male | 15 | 62.6 | 64 | 61–66 |
| Chinese — Female | 25 | 59.7 | 61 | 58–63 |
| Indian — Male | 3 | 59.3 | 63 | 52–63 |
| Indian — Female | 3 | 63.7 | 63 | 62–66 |
| Lain-lain — Male | 9 | 64.7 | 65 | 58–70 |
| Lain-lain — Female | 13 | 60.4 | 62 | 61–64 |
Heads up: Indian cell sizes (n = 6) are small, so treat those means as directional, not definitive.
PD by state
Only states with at least three customers are shown.
| State | n | Mean (mm) | Median (mm) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Selangor | 59 | 61.4 | 62 |
| Kuala Lumpur | 18 | 60.5 | 61 |
| Johor | 10 | 61.2 | 63 |
| Sabah | 8 | 64.8 | 64 |
| Sarawak | 7 | 61.9 | 64 |
| Penang | 7 | 63.7 | 65 |
| Perak | 3 | 62.3 | 60 |
| Kedah | 3 | 62.7 | 64 |
Why this matters if you're buying glasses
Most adults fall in the 58–68 mm band. If your PD is outside that range, be extra careful with wider frames, because the lens optical centre may not line up properly with your pupil.
Women average roughly 2.8 mm narrower than men. This is the single biggest reason pasar malam reading glasses feel wrong for so many women. Those ready-made ones default to 63 mm, which is closer to a male PD.
Don't guess from ethnicity. The inter-ethnic gap at the median is under a millimetre, which is basically noise. Measure your actual PD.
And if you're seeing a PD below 55 mm, that's almost always a teenager or a young adult with a narrow face, not a full-grown man. Double-check before ordering.
How to measure your own PD
You don't actually need to see an optometrist for this. A ruler and a mirror will get you within a millimetre. If that sounds fiddly, the phone-selfie method works too, and our free virtual try-on can help you sanity-check. Full walkthrough over at where to check your power. Once you order from 100glasses, we save the measurement on your account so you don't have to do it again for your next pair.
Methodology
Data source. Real prescription submissions from 124 unique 100glasses customers over the last 12 months. If a customer ordered more than once, only their most recent PD is counted, so repeat buyers don't skew the mean.
Filtering. We kept numeric PDs between 40 mm and 80 mm. Blank PDs got dropped. Obvious test entries (think "123" or "aaaa") got dropped. Single-letter names got dropped.
Ethnic and gender inference. We don't ask for either at checkout. Both were inferred from the customer's name by a large language model using standard Malaysian naming conventions: bin/binti for Malay, Kaur/Singh and a/l/a/p for Indian, romanised surnames for Chinese (Lim, Tan, Wong, Ng, Teo, Khaw and so on), and Bornean markers like anak for the Lain-lain bucket. When a customer combined a Chinese surname with a Western first name ("Claudia Khaw" is the example I kept hitting), the Western first name carried the gender signal.
Confidence. Of the classifications, 98 were high-confidence, 19 medium, and 7 low.
Caveats
- Race and gender are inferred from names, not self-reported.
- Some Chinese customers provided only romanised given names without a disambiguating Western first name, so gender is Unknown for that subset.
- Lain-lain aggregates native East Malaysians (Iban, Kadazan, Bidayuh, Bajau) and foreign residents (Filipino, Arab, Japanese). Larger samples would allow subgroup breakdowns.
- The sample is self-selected. Online prescription-eyewear buyers skew urban and younger than the national population average.
License
This dataset is released under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Cite, quote, or republish the aggregate statistics on this page, just credit 100glasses Malaysia. We never publish raw customer-level data and never will.
Last updated 21 April 2026. Sample: 124 Malaysian adults.