Frame styling and fitting
thirty minutes
Half an hour of the optician's time and the run of the frame room.
Anybody choosing frames who would rather not do it alone. No charge.
No charge
In the frame room
Sunglasses and tints
Prescription or not, and the part that is not about the colour.
The useful thing a pair of sunglasses does is block ultraviolet, and that is a property of the lens material rather than of how dark it looks. A very dark lens with no ultraviolet filter is worse than no sunglasses, because the pupil opens behind it. Every frame in the catalogue can be glazed as prescription sunglasses.
What this includes
- Any catalogue frame glazed with a tinted prescription lens
- Polarised lenses, which help on water and on a wet road and hurt on some dashboards
- Photochromic lenses that darken outdoors, with what they do badly said plainly
- Tints in three densities, chosen by looking through them rather than at them
- Children's sunglasses, because a child gets more sun on their eyes than an adult does
What this is not
- A darker lens is not a better filter and can be a worse one
- Photochromic lenses barely darken behind a car windscreen and we will say so before you buy
Tints and coatings
Polarised and photochromic are both coatings, priced and explained the same way as any other.
| Coating | What it does | From |
|---|---|---|
| Anti-reflection | Lets more light through the lens and stops other people seeing it bounce off. | $65 |
| Scratch-resistant hard coat | Makes a plastic lens harder to scratch. Not impossible to scratch. | $35 |
| Ultraviolet filter | Blocks ultraviolet in a clear lens, with no tint. | $25 |
| Photochromic | Darkens in daylight and clears indoors, slowly. | $125 |
| Polarised | Cuts reflected glare off water, snow and wet roads. | $95 |
| Thinner material | The same prescription in a thinner, lighter lens. | $85 |
About the price. Every price on this site is a starting price for one part of the job. A frame, a lens design and each coating are priced separately, because they are chosen separately and because what a pair of glasses costs depends on a prescription that has not been written yet. Nothing on this site adds up to a total, deliberately, and you will be told the price of the whole job before anything is ordered.
Book time with the optician
Half an hour of the optician's time and the run of the frame room.
Ready to look at sunglasses?
Ring to book an eye examination, or come in and browse the frame room — no appointment needed to look.