Artikel: The summer of the coloured lens
The summer of the coloured lens
Spotted is our style journal: what's being worn this season, and what makes it work.
For about a decade the default sunglass lens has been as dark as the law allows — near-black, uniform, faintly anonymous. That is changing. This season the interesting lenses are the ones with colour in them: warm ambers and bronzes, cool sapphires, soft gradients that fade rather than block. It is the first eyewear shift in a while that is about the lens rather than the frame, which makes it worth explaining properly.
What a tint actually does
A tint is not just a mood. Lens colour changes which parts of the spectrum reach your eye, and that changes what you see.
Brown, amber, bronze
Cuts blue light and lifts contrast. Edges look crisper, depth reads more clearly. The one for changeable British light, for driving, and for sport on grass.
Grey
The neutral. Dims everything evenly and leaves colours looking true — still the right answer for bright, flat, high-sun conditions.
Blue, sapphire
Knocks back glare bouncing off water and pale surfaces, and softens the yellow cast of strong midday light.
Which is to say: the current fashion for a warm lens is not only a fashion. Amber happens to be the tint that flatters most faces and does the most work in overcast conditions.
Gradient or solid?
A solid tint is even from top to bottom — the choice for full, unbroken sun.
A gradient is darker at the top and lighter towards the bottom. It shades the sky while leaving your lower field of view relatively clear, which is why gradients are the more comfortable option behind the wheel, where you still need to read an instrument panel, and in town, where you are looking down as much as out.
If you only own one pair, a gradient is the more versatile buy. If you spend real time in bright sun, go solid.
Get the look
Five coloured-lens pairs from our own range, across warm and cool:
Matte brown tortoise, bronze gradient. The warmest of the five — the closest thing here to the amber the season is built on.
Matte tortoise with a warm tungsten lens. A relaxed, squarish shape that suits most faces.
The same shape the cool way — a clear acetate front against a sapphire lens.
The same silhouette slimmed down, with a grey gradient. The understated option.
A rounder frame with a polarised sapphire lens, so it kills reflected glare as well as brightness.
Not sure which size sits right on your face? Our frame-width finder will narrow it down in about a minute.
If you wear a prescription
You are not limited to what comes ready-made. Our specialist glazing lab can put a tint into prescription lenses — solid or gradient, in a choice of colours — so you can take the same idea into a frame you actually want to wear. Choose any optical frame and build the lenses in on the product page.
Already have a frame you love? We can reglaze it rather than replace it.
Style views in our journal are our own. Product images are official brand photography of frames from our own range, and every frame we recommend is one we stock.
