Online Sunglasses Guide - How to find the right fit

Buying sunglasses online versus buying sunglasses in the store. Obviously, the latter one is easier. You can touch-n-feel and see for yourself if the sunglasses are fitting your face or not. Are they matching your style or not?

But with online purchasing like with every fashion commodity, you don’t know whether it will match your face or not. When you are buying sunglasses in special lenses like prescription or polarised, it makes you more unsure.

Buying sunglasses online is convenient. You don’t have to go out of home just to buy a pair of sunglasses. You can just browse at home and choose at your convenience.

The big problem, however, is finding the right fit. Let me help you with that.

How to buy the right sunglasses online

You will need to pay attention to three things

1. The right fit
2. The right style
3. The right colour

1. The Right Fit

By right fit, I mean the size of the frame. Like clothes, you cannot wear one size smaller or larger. For glasses and sunglasses, you will have to find out the right fit for your face. If you are a glasses wearer or have an older pair of sunglasses, check the size of it. It is mostly mentioned on the inner side of the glasses temple. There will be three numbers mentioned.

Lens width

Bridge with

Temple Arm Length

Sometimes there are four numbers mentioned. The fourth one is the Lens length. This is mostly in the case of varifocals.

These sizes are important for the right fit. If your glasses do not have this number mentioned or they got rubbed off, you can check by measuring your glasses or by checking your prescription slip for PD or pupillary distance.

Pupillary distance is the distance between the centre of one eye to another. This is important to determine your centre of vision. This helps in determining the right width for your lenses.

Knowing PD, measuring glasses size can be a lot more confusing, a simple solution is to use the credit card test.

Take a credit card and put it under your eyes. If the smaller side of the credit card is bigger than one of your eyes, then choose a small size of glasses or sunglasses.

If your eye is the same size as the smaller side of a credit card, then choose medium size glasses.

If your eyes are as big as the smaller side of a credit card then choose the large size of glasses.

2. The Right Style

Not every style of glasses will match your face. Just like wearing a shirt with stripes can make you look shorter or taller. Some glasses can dampen your look. You need to know which style of glasses match your face. Before that, you should know the shape of your face. Your face can be round, oval, diamond, heart-shaped, square or triangle.

You can find the shape of your face by tracing your image in the mirror or checking your photograph.

1. Round face - Your face has an equal proportion of forehead, cheekbones and chin
2. Oval face - Your face is slightly longer with an equal proportion of the forehead and chin
3. Heart-shaped face - You have a larger forehead, and a narrower chin, your face representing a heart
4. Square face - Your face has equal proportion but with sharp angular lines like a square
5. Diamond - You have a longer face with a narrower forehead and chin and angular lines for forehead, cheeks and chin
6. Triangle - You have a wider forehead and narrower chin, like an inverted triangle

The right style matching your face will be the one that will balance your facial features and highlight the best quality of your face.

Rectangular sunglasses look cool and classy. If you have a round face, wearing this shape of sunglasses is the best for you. This will give you a bold look and balance out your round features. Your face will appear a bit longer.

If you have an oval face, you can also choose this face.

For a square face, don’t choose this style, it will add more angular lines to your already sharp features. This will dampen your look.

Round sunglasses are the best fit for square faces, triangle faces and heart-shaped faces. Round sunglasses will soften the angular lines and give you a contrasting look. Your face will stand out in a good way.

Don’t wear round sunglasses if you have a round face. These frames will dampen your look. You will look gullible wearing this.

• Aviators

Aviators are cool, stylish, bold, daring, adventurous and quite manly right. Not just men, even women like aviator sunglasses. However, this cool style can only best fit only a few faces.

If you have a round face, go for rectangular aviators. You can go for heavier double brows without hampering your look.

With a square face, go for rounder aviators. Don’t go for too heavy brow lines. Single brow or thin double brows will look great on your face.

Choose out the style of aviators that will contrast with your face. If you feel even a bit of Nah, then don’t go for it.

• Wayfarers

Round, Oval, Heart-shaped, Diamond shape, can go for this sunglasses style. The wayfarer sunglasses with slightly rounded edges will look refreshing on angular faces like a diamond.

• Cat-eye

Almost every face shape. Cat-eye sunglasses with rounder and slight wings will work wonder on square faces. And cat-eye with sharper wings will bring chicness for round faces.

3. The Right Colour

The right colour of frames or tints can bring a whole lot of change to your face. To match sunglasses with your skin tone, choose one that will contrast with your skin.

The secret to getting a wow look is to perfectly balance the colours. Your face has several colours, like your skin tone, your eyes colour and your hair colour. To perfectly balance the colour, choose something contrasting or blending well with your face.

A safer option is tortoiseshell, the patterned brown or Havana colour matches every skin tone and the patterns contrast your skin tone. If you have the same tone of skin colour, hair and eyes, then wear contrasting colours. Keep a balance between contrasting and blending colours.

For instance, I have black hair, medium tone skin and black eyes. I can choose a neutral colour like black or brown, or a contrasting colour like green, blue, even white.

You can try out pastel colours. Irrespective of skin tone or hair colour these colours add delicacy to your look. Match well with your outfit and you get perfect sunglasses for your look.