Prescription Sunglasses Explained
One of the best-kept secrets in eyewear: you don't need to squint through summer or wear clip-ons. Almost any full-rim frame — including most designer sunglasses — can be glazed with lenses made to your exact prescription. Here's how it works at Total Eyewear.
Three routes to prescription sun
1. Tint your clear lenses. Choose any frame, add prescription lenses, then add a solid or gradient tint in brown, grey or green — and a mirror finish on top if you like. This gives you the widest choice of frames at the lowest cost.
2. Go polarised. Polarised prescription lenses don't just darken the world — a filter inside the lens blocks the harsh reflected glare that bounces off water, wet roads and car bonnets. If you drive a lot or spend time on the water, this is the serious upgrade.
3. Choose Transitions®. One pair for everything: clear indoors, automatically darkening in sunlight. Ideal if you don't want to carry two pairs.
Sunglasses frames with your prescription
Most classic sunglass shapes — aviators, wayfarers, rounds — take prescription lenses beautifully. Very strong prescriptions and very large or steeply-curved frames can be trickier; our lens picker automatically shows only combinations our specialist glazing lab will make for your numbers, so you can't order something that won't work. If a frame can't take prescription lenses at all, the option simply won't appear on its page.
One honest thing to know about branded lenses
When we glaze a frame to your prescription, we fit Essilor lenses — made by the world's leading lens manufacturer — in place of the lenses that came with the frame, including branded sunglass lenses with an etched Ray-Ban or Oakley logo. No independent lab can etch a frame brand's logo onto its lenses; the brands reserve that for complete pairs made in their own factories. Your frame keeps every bit of its genuine branding — and your lenses are Essilor, made for your eyes.
UV protection, with or without darkness
Worth knowing: UV protection comes from the lens material and coatings, not the darkness of the tint. A pale gradient tint with full UV protection shields your eyes just as well as a dark lens — darkness is about comfort and glare, not safety.
How to order
Open any frame, choose Add Prescription Lenses, enter your prescription (our 2-minute guide helps), then pick Polarised, Transitions®, or a Clear lens with a tint added in the extras step. Every pair is glazed in our dedicated glazing lab and checked by our eyewear specialists before dispatch.