Glasses direct blog

In our opinion, its seasoned dudes like David Hockney who help place Britain firmly on map, when it comes to producing artistic greats.

British Icon: Hockney

The 74 year old was promoting a newly devised technique of filming video art that is ‘better than 3D’ yesterday, whilst at the press release of his up and coming exhibition in London. Using 9 cameras to create ‘9D’ film Hockney also spoke of being able to create landscapes with his iPad as ‘fantastic’. The pioneering artist used a mixture of up-to-the minute technology to produce his retrospective exhibition which starts at the end of January 2012 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

A legend for a legend: John Lennon JL10B

Hockney showcased his iconic style at the press launch with a pair of circular tortoiseshell specs: A style of which he’s become synonymous with since his first foray into the art world, along with his series of swimming pool paintings that he produced whilst living in LA, back in the 1960s. The British artist who spent many a year living in California, cemented his name in the art world with his highly realistic style and vibrant colours, as well as being famed for rubbing shoulders with the likes of Andy Warhol and fashion designer Celia Birtwell (who appears in several of his works).
With an heir of ‘agelessness’ about him, Hockney looked bright eyed and switched on, showing us how true timeless style is achieved. We love Hockney’s choice of symmetrical specs, which would add a sartorial edge to the most casual of outfits and perfect for this season’s preppy trend, for boy or for girl.
Hockey’s exhibition ‘Bigger Picture ‘runs from 21st January to 9th April next year at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Updated 3rd of November:

Shop with complete confidence at Glasses Direct during the Royal Mail strikes and get FREE DELIVERY until midnight monday

You can be assured that your glasses will arrive – not only have Royal Mail provided that assurance to us, but as always, we take 100% responsibility to ensure your glasses arrive in good condition. And on top of that, we’re offering FREE DELIVERY on all orders until Monday evening when this current round of strikes ends to make sure our customers stay as happy as ever. We’re also using 1st Class Mail as standard which takes priority over lots of other mail to make sure you get your glasses as soon as possible.

Based on recent experience, the strikes are creating delays of a few days but given that your glasses are not an overnight delivery (since we have to fit the lenses), you should still get them within our guide timescale for delivery.

We are avoiding sending out your glasses on actual strike days so your glasses will dispatched when ready and on the day the Royal Mail service resumes. Most customers have told us they prefer to wait any extra day or two rather than stay in to sign for them from a courier service.

If you need to return a pair of glasses you’ve recently received, please do so as normal, following the instructions provided on your receipt or on our website. We will extend the 14 day period to take into account any potential further delays within Royal Mail.

You can read the latest news on the Strikes on the Royal Mail website.

Getting your Home Trial
We will be extending the 10 day Home Trial by several days to allow for any delays in getting the glasses to you. The 10 days will only start on the day your Home Trial leaves our offices, and we will not be sending out any packages on actual strike days to avoid any uncertainty on the whereabouts of your Home Trial.

Returning your Home Trial
Once you have put the glasses back in the post we will be extending the return deadline to allow for any potential further delays within Royal Mail. Should we have any queries on the whereabouts of the Home Trial, we’ll get in touch with you to discuss this further.

Image courtesy of photon_de

If anyone in London fancies coming in to help us out with some research on new functionality, then we have some slots left.

It will be in our baker street offices, and should last around an hour, and we’ll give you a voucher for £40 to spend on our site as a thank you. You can see some ideas for the site, and give your views on what we should change/do.

They’ll be during work hours next week, but if you can’t do that and are interested in taking part any other future research we’re doing then get in contact and we’ll put you on the list for future projects.

If you’re interested drop me an email at david.carruthers@glassesdirect.co.uk

Asking for questions on twitter the other day, this one came in:

http://twitter.com/catalogbiz/statuses/2017607429

What does the Axis part on the prescription mean? What is “average”?

I asked another David, one of our team of dispensing opticians:

“The axis is the orientation of the astigmatism. The value is in degrees, and can be anything from 1 to 180. There is no average value, and the number doesn’t have any relevance to the size of the astigmatism ( that is indicated in the CYL box ).

Its probably best described as being like a compass bearing. The bearing you walk on doesn’t relate to how far you walk, its just the direction of travel.”

And an astigmatism? What’s that?

“Instead of being spherical like a football, most eyes are cylinder shaped, a bit like a rugby ball, and need correcting in two meridians; a spherical (SPH) component, and a cylindrical, or astigmatic (CYL) one. The AXIS is the direction along which the cylindrical component (astigmatism) lies.”

So there you go, hope that helps out. How’s the language? Understandable?

The way that I imagine it (from a non-optician’s viewpoint) is like this:
Imagine holding up a tall glass (like this one) up in front of your eye. The ‘Cyl’ value is similar to the thickness of the glass, and the ‘Axis’ value is the angle at which you hold the glass in front of your eye.

Any thing else you want to know, just ask in the comments.

Some of our glasses have recently appeared in an advert for Dulux paint.

The lady wears a pair from our Scandinavian range and the gent steams up a pair of Mai Tai

We’ve set up a flickr group for people to post pictures of themselves in their new specs – or to get second opinions on their Home Trials.
There’s also a question ‘How many pairs of glasses do you own’

I thought I’d list mine here.

I’m pretty obsessive about glasses, and I have a lot of pairs. What I find is that, just like my wardrobe, there’s a core set that I wear often, and a bunch of others that get occasional outings.

Different pairs definitely have different feelings
- my rimless pair were sensible and neutral, and vaguely stylish they go with anything. They were my default pair that get the most public time – unfortunately they were lost over the side of a canoe in wales.

- my bold plastic pair are cooler than the rest, but slightly pretentious. I’m totally gutted that they’ve broken, as they were my day-to-day pair.

- My Second pair of bold plastics are also cool, and very comfortable. For some reason I feel safe in them. Madrid glasses from Glasses Direct for £29

- super bold plastic pair with blue lenses are overtly ‘fashionable’ and I need to be in a very confident mood to wear them.

- my yellow aviators are great fun – I feel oddly rock’n'roll when wearing them. Very Hunter S. Thompson
Unfortunately I’ve lost these somewhere, but they looked a bit like these:

- my red plastic ones – are slightly too much for my wife to bear, but look great with the right togs on. The darker colours are better for these though I think. Kamikaze glasses from Glasses Direct.

- my plain plastic ones fall off too much, so I’ve never really worn them

- my swimmers are great for…erm…swimming. so much better than contacts in the pool, which always end up falling out and stinging afterwards from the chlorine.

- my graduated tint aviator sunnies – are fantastic. Simply fantastic, and i wear them whenever it’s sunny. Personally I think they’re cooler than most people’s branded sunnies. They’re Ray with grey graduated tint lenses.

- my wirey ted baker specs – I can’t wear these for very long as the lenses are massive and I foolishly didn’t go for thin lenses so they dig into my nose.

- my wireless bendable specs – were bought from vision express as part of a competitor shop. They’re good everyday specs, but we sell the same type of glasses for about £150 less. Our version Malaga bendable rimless are currently out of stock.

- these are just stupid, I bought them on a whim as they’re so incredibly huge and I have yet to put lenses in them. As they’re SO massive I’ll have to get extremely thin lenses put into them otherwise they’ll be too heavy on my nose.

- My Bolle bold specs were a bargain from our own site (not in stock at the moment). I wear these most days.

- My most expensive pair are a lovely pair of glasses by a company called ‘Mykita’ which I bought from a wonderful little opticians in Brighton. I can’t afford to buy too many pairs like this, but I couldn’t resist.

So there you have it – my current range of 14 pairs of prescription glasses
3 pairs from high street chains
4 pairs from Glasses Direct
1 pair from an independent optician
2 pairs bought online, then glazed by Glasses Direct
3 pairs bought from competitors online
1 pair bought from a sports shop! (The goggles)
- Oh and a small batch of daily contact lenses that I occasionally wear.

What about you?

The snow has hit the west country pretty hard overnight, and many of our customer service staff in Swindon haven’t been able to get into work today.

Those that can work from home are doing so, dealing with emails and other work that can be accessed over the internet, but there will be less people available on the phones so it may take longer than normal to get through. Sorry if you do get delayed, but we are trying!

This is the view out of our office window, and you can see the carpark is pretty empty and the snow pretty deep.

This was a lovely way to finish the day. Our good friend Ran pointed out that one of our products was on the Friday Funny Reviews page of reevoo


“This is no exaggeration: The first night I wore these glasses out, I was invited to join a gentlemen’s club, asked to play rugby for a local team, and I went home with a beautiful young lady who claimed, the next day, to have only talked to me because of my glasses. These glasses = WIN.”




See this and a bunch of others on the reevoo funny friday reviews page


We don’t know who this illustrious customer is but, sir, we salute you. And your mai tai glasses.

There are quite a few blogs which take fashions from the high-street, rather than the catwalk, spotting and snapping people seen out and about looking fabulous daahlink. The most famous of these is the Sartorialist. I think they’re wonderful.

Writing as someone who’s not the coolest lollipop in the freezer it’s nice to see fashion in a real world setting rather than the oddities of the emaciated fashion show twigs.

There’s a new one that I found today via Eye Heart Glasses, a very cool New Zealand blog run by Jo about Glasses.

In her latest post she draws together a few items of interest from around the web, and one of them was from Advanced Style which has the fantastic tag line:

PROOF FROM THE WIZENED AND SILVER-HAIRED SET THAT PERSONAL STYLE ADVANCES WITH AGE.

It’s chock full of the dapper and the chic, who eschew the twin-set and zimmer. Plenty of them with some pretty fantastic glasses.

[Photo by MISTER MORT]



[Photo by Advanced Style]



[Photo by Advanced Style]



[Photo by MISTER MORT]


I’m going to enjoy following this site.

A couple of months ago I nearly got knocked off my bike.

As an assured cyclist this was a bit of a shock to me, I’m normally very careful and aware of my surroundings, but on this one particular day I noticed I was missing a lot of activity. I soon learned what the problem was.

My glasses.

I realised that what may make a great pair of glasses to wear during the day won’t necessarily make a great pair of glasses to drive or cycle in. Now I have a specific pair that I wear for cycling & driving.

So what was wrong with them? They were glasses with large plastic arms. A style I love to wear (Although the wife says they don’t actually suit me…), but causes big safety issues when driving or cycling.














As you can see, they entirely destroy your peripheral vision, making it very difficult to see anything coming from the left or right, and meaning you have to turn your head to see the wing mirrors.

Also the lens rims themselves are thick so you lose vision there too.

So what should you look for in some Driving glasses?

1. Thin arms – the thinner the arms, the better your peripheral vision
2. Thin rims – again, less light is blocked from your eyes
3. Secure on your face – so they won’t slip off when you turn your head quickly
4. Big field of vision – So all your peripheral vision is in focus, and you can see the dashboard
5. Strong/tough frame

It’s likely that theses glasses will be thrown around a lot in your car, shoved in glove compartments, ashtrays, coin holders and that shelf in the door (no-one here can think of the name for it). It’s also quite likely that you’ll leave them on a seat and someone will sit on them.


There are 2 main styles that cover all these traits.

1. Large aviator style frames
2. Large rimless frames

Large aviator styles

These glasses called ‘Robert‘ are comfortable, have a huge area of vision, small arms, no rims along the bottom so limited peripheral vision loss, and resilient ultra thin flex arms to make them tough.

Otherwise these glasses called ‘Stan‘ are made of bendable metal so will be far more resilient if you leave them on the passenger seat and someone sits on them by mistake. They should just pop back into shape.

These glassses, Ray, are one of our basic pairs of aviators with the ‘comfort bridge’ keeping them nicely on your nose and very comfortable.

These are called ‘Toronto‘ and have tiny arms and no rims, so peripheral vision should be maximised, and they are also made of bendable metal, so can take a bit of rough treatment.

To make the ‘ultimate’ pair of driving glasses you should also think about a pair with Polarised lenses to enhance your driving in bright sunshine, these minimise glare from headlights, and light reflected off the road.

As a result of this I now have a pair of bendable rimless frames which I put on for cycling & driving then I swap once I’m at work to something a bit more swish, and I’m going to get a pair of polarised aviators for the car…when the sun finally returns.

Since changing to them I’ve had no more ‘incidents’ with traffic, although I’ve probably just cursed myself by saying that.