To celebrate men, moustaches and the month of Movember, I have decided to pen a little piece celebrating the art of the double facial appendage. I mean, why hide your features behind one clever disguise when you can completely bamboozle the enemy with two! So let’s all get out our moustache combs, brush the dust off the Ray Bans and embrace the month of Movember as if it were our last!

Ned Flanders:

No other programme captures modern life like The Simpsons and no other man carries the old push broom as well as Ned Flanders. Clearly designed around the Magnum PI ‘tache, Ned epitomises the suburban nerd and captured the moustache/specs combo perfectly…….okely dokely?

Ned works specs AND a tache. Genius.

Say “hello Ned-erino” with the JL260F and matching jumper.Hercule Poirot:

Although, probably the most famous creation from the mind of Agatha Christie and brought to life so perfectly by David Suchet in the TV adaptations, his keen mind and sleuthing skills have been well hidden behind his little twirly moustache and glasses. Although not as unkempt as the “Flanders”, what it lacks in volume it more than makes up for in “Artistic Polish”

Ali G:

As part of the “West Staines Massiv” but actually living with his grand mother at 36 Cherry Blossom Close, Ali G has come to represent all that is well wicked in W London and his sporting of the full on face fungus and bright yellow lensed sunglasses is, in our books,  proper booyakasha and deserves much respek.

'Is you Madonna?'

Join in wit da crew with the Nueu 06 with yellow tinited lenses

Groucho Marx:

Born in a room above a butcher’s shop means too things. A) you’ll never run out of sausages and B) there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be a very famous film star.

Groucho achieved both of these with a razor sharp wit, a trademark cigar and a truly awesome ‘tache. It started off as being grease painted on but proved so popular Groucho decided to grow his own and kept it for the rest of his life showing you can never keep a good moustache down!

'Need a little help reading the small-print?'

Being nice to his mum, a model citizen and “that nice chap next door” are 3 phrases not commonly associated with Adolf Hitler. In fact, they’re about as well used as chopsticks at an all you can eat soup buffet.  The other sight you don’t get to see very often is Hitler wearing specs and as The Daily Mail reported this week, there’s a very good reason for it.

According to recent stories, Hitler needed reading glasses but being the chap he was, deemed them as a sign of weakness in front of his supporters, so he never wore them. Now most of us when we hit a certain age, will be told we need specs to read. So we bite the bullet, log on to the Glasses Direct site and buy a pair. What we don’t do is toodle off and invade Poland.

Presbyopia or the loss of accommodation in the eye ( or, the need for longer arms) is something we all encounter at some point as we pass the great, big 4…0 but we just chalk it up to experience and carry on. Hitler choice to ignore it completely and simply had a type writer made with extra large print and had his top PR bods and spin doctors (now that’s a tough gig) double space all his speech notes so he could read better.

So his rather classy specs, probably the most under used in history, find themselves up for sale for the princely sum of £5000 (you don’t even get a second pair free) along with a few other of his personal effects. If you have the cash, then casually dropping into conversation “you haven’t by any chance seen my glasses have you? You know the ones, gold? rimless? swastika on the side?” might impress some but I’d prefer the 2 for 1 for £59 with us. Cheaper and a bit less controversial when flying abroad.

The question in the news right now is ‘could glasses soon be history?’ It turns out scientists have identified a gene that causes short-sightedness and have predicted they will reduce the number of individuals with short-sightedness within a decade. So what does this mean for the world of spectacles?

I have been a glasses wearer since the meager age of three, where the glasses were so big you could barely see my face behind them. I remember starting school and being looked at strangely and making friends with the only other kid in the class who also wore glasses too. By the time I was leaving school and starting university, specs had all of a sudden become cool. I looked around and everyone was wearing them, even people who didn’t need them. The world had gone crazy for the one thing I had dreaded wearing most of my life!

Specs have become a fashion statement, so what will happen if they are no longer needed as much? Will people continue to wear them anyway but without prescriptions? What will happen when the genes are identified for the other various eye disorders?

It’s an interesting concept. Feel free to post any thoughts you might have, we’d love to hear from you.

With 65% of the British public feeling ‘ripped off’ at their opticians and almost half admitting they’ve actually postponed their eye test because of the costs involved with buying new glasses, we at Glasses Direct felt it was our responsibility to help clarify the rather baffling optical world.

We have created a guide called ‘seeing clearly’ to help you make clear, informed choices when it comes to shopping for your glasses. We teamed up with Plain English Campaign (an independent group fighting for plain English in public communication) and received their Crystal Mark to show that this guide is as clear as it can be.

For clear information on what your prescription means, what you should expect during and after an eye test, how to find the best glasses for you and much more, check out our seeing clearly guide here. You will also find a downloadable pocket guide to take with you in your pocket or handbag at your next visit so that you’re armed with all the knowledge you need!

Have a listen to our latest radio coverage here:

And take a look at some of the other great coverage below in the Times, Metro, Sunday Mirror, the Scotsman and Daily Express.

MIT Media Lab claim to have found a way to get your eye prescription – through a new app on your mobile phone. It works by clipping a small plastic device onto your mobile phone, looking into the lens and pressing the arrow keys several times. It all takes less than two minutes – less time than making a cup of tea! The company has built this app for use in developing countries which lack these systems, to ensure people are looking after their eyes.

Imagine… testing your eyes and then browsing online to find a pair of glasses you love all in the comfort of your own home – you wouldn’t even have to step out of your front door. Check out a short video here to see exactly how it works. Well we’re certainly going to be watching this space. For those of you reading this, do let us know about any other new and inspiring technology developments in the optical world, we’d love to hear all about it…

Recently featured in Wired magazine, you will need a microscope to see these glasses. This is a 2mm frames sporting a 0.1mm logo, seen here pictured on a house-fly. The logo is the equivalent size of a human hair, and was lazered onto the frames using, from a stationary machine, whilst the frames were moved around using a positioning machine.

Looks as though this was a warm-up act by German company Micreon for their next trick: to engrave tiny lettering onto watch faces. Reminds me of the artist Willard Wigan, who creates sculptures too small for the human eye to see. One of his works that I saw was set on a plinth which was the eye of a needle, and the sculpture itself was of a ship whose ropes were made out of spiders web strands. He gives a fascinating talk here.

We’ll be sticking to the day job of choosing the best styles and designs that suit your eyes and wardrobe, which means you probably won’t find these bug-eyed glasses at Glasses Direct for the foreseeable future

Lot 364 at New York’s Antiquorum Auctioneers had a reserve of about $20,000 and by the end of the auction, bids had been received for up to the staggering amount of $2 million. But the highly popular auction for Mahatma Gandhi’s iconic glasses became controversial after various calls (bolstered by the Indian Government itself) that it was of questionable legality, that it threatened to remove a national treasure from India, and tampered with the Gandhi legacy. People were particularly incensed that the sale itself was a contradiction of Gandhi’s own anti-materialist principles.

The twist in the tale is that Vijay Mallya, an Indian liquor and airline executive who owns the company that makes Kingfisher beer, turned out to be the winner of the auction and subsequently declared that he will be returning the glasses to India for public display. Added to that, the happy ending was that Tushar Gandhi, 49, a great-grandson of Gandhi, hasbeen reported as saying “I am very happy now. Now the things will come back to India to where it rightly belongs.”

I recommend reading the NY times coverage of the exciting auction process and surrounding controversy here and here.

So what do you think? If the auction had not gone ahead, as everyone was calling for, the glasses would be probably still be hidden in the collection of filmmaker James Otis somewhere in Los Angeles. But now that it has gone ahead, the glasses are returned to delight crowds in a museum in India.

The Opus Design Award is a Japanese based competition for people wishing to ‘Deliberate Today through the subject of eyewear’ if you please.

There’s some lovely ideas. Who knows how many we’ll see on sale at Glasses Direct in the future?

This years winner was ‘Switch’, a photochromic pair of glasses where the entire pair change in sunlight, not just the lenses.

Project here

The silver prize went to the thought provoking idea of glasses for blind people – so that the glasses actually indicate the blindness instead of/as well as the stick:

Project here




These are slightly scary. Clamping to your face.

Project here

However the best for my money are these, if only for the dodgy translation. They’re glasses designed to counter the problem of the lenses steaming up when eating hot food.

When you eating hot food,
the misty in glesses is the most besetment for people
who put on a pair of glesses.
But it is discourteous that somebody usually shave the glesses.
Easy to shave the glesses not only well-mannered but also elegance

Project here

Here’s one that went from crazy design in 2002, into production

2008 Awards

Let us know any you think are particularly good.

Note: the main awards site does have a few broken links on it, but it’s worth persevering.

I’ve seen some fancy glasses around recently. I’ve already blogged about the asymmetric specs. But what about these:

The glasses are transparent, and you fill them with the ink that you want.

Created by the portuguese designer Luis Porem

Thought I’d just publish this little list of songs I found which are related to glasses and/or eyes. You will find a selection of them on our ‘on-hold’ music

Let me know if you can think of any others you can think of and I’ll try and include them on Radio GD too. For the record, I’m a Jimmy Cliff fan (go see the Harder They Come if you havent already. Think it’s on at the Barbican although i saw it at the Playhouse) so I can See Clearly Now is my favorite and has actually featured on our on-hold music since 2005!