These Cheap Glasses Changed My Life
I never thought I’d go for cheap eyewear. I was wrong.
Let’s get this out of the way: I’m a terrible snob about glasses. I’ve been a four-eyes ever since I had to squint to read the blackboard in Grade 2, which means I’ve spent 80% of my life viewing the world from behind a barrier. It took me a long time to fully embrace the bespectacled life (note the frameless glasses I wore in high school as if some people…wouldn’t notice?) but after I realized that contact lenses were never in the cards1 I learned how to appreciate the way my face looks shielded by frames. Naturally, I’ve developed some deeply held and well-informed opinions about glasses over the past three decades. Here are a few:
1. Online try-ons are a scam
Thanks to the ‘wonders of technology’, just about every website you can buy glasses from has some sort of virtual try-on tool that purports to tell you what a pair of glasses will look like on your face. Do not be fooled. How you look in a facsimile picture online has nothing to do with how a pair of glasses will fit IRL. There’s no substitute for going into a store to try something on a store before making a final call.
2. Cheap glasses are never worth it
I have an incredibly high prescription and an absurdly small head—a winning combination that makes it virtually impossible for me to buy affordable frames. Sure, I’ve gone into places like Bon Look, Bailey Nelson, and Warby Parker. But every single pair I have tried on is either way too big for my face (you’d think the prescription was for my cheeks, not just my eyes), or immediately slides off my head.
As such, I’m forced to frequent specialty hole-in-the-wall optical stores where a weird guru-type employee has to guide me through the rabbit warren of frames and can instantly tell if a pair looks good on me or not. I got the everyday frames I’ve been wearing since 2018 at Optic Zone near St. Lawrence Market. Frames at these kind of stores usually start at $500 and my lens prescription alone is just over $400, so I can afford to buy new glasses, oh, about every five years.
Yet every piece of what I has assumed was hard-earned wisdom about glasses was challenged when I tried on a pair of purple, round, chunky glasses by the Vancouver-based brand KITS. I tried them on absent-mindedly, the way I do all glasses that I’m not seriously considering, and snapped to attention when I saw what was looking back at me in the mirror.
They looked…surprisingly good? Their chunkiness reminded me of a juiced-up version my current frames and something about them was really giving “kooky rich art collector,” a vibe I’ve been trying to channel my entire life.
Once I had seen this vision of myself I became a woman obsessed and literally begged the brand to send me a pair of glasses. They obliged and ever since then I’ve been living out my wealthy woman fantasies, pretending I’m in the middle of a very competitive Damien Hirst auction every time I put them on.
I genuinely have no idea how KITS is able to sell actual prescription glasses for $90 (maybe I don’t want to know) but I am so genuinely surprised and delighted to have found a pair of glasses at a normal person store that work for me, I simply had to share. I won’t lie, the fit on them isn’t quite perfect. I’ve developed a habit of pushing them up my nose every three minutes. But I love the way they look so much that I’m more than happy to make the adjustment.
I’m viscerally disgusted by the sensation of touching an eyeball and cannot bring myself to do it.