The Perfect Eyeglass Fit – What To Look For

We make it our mission to help you find a frame you’ll love, and that fits as if it were tailor-made for you. We’ve found that the perception of a good fit can vary from client to client so we decided to write a simple post on eyewear fit from a professional optician’s perspective. We’ve seen thousands of faces in our frames and we thought you’d like to know the ideal eyeglass fit we had in mind when designing and fitting each frame.

Frame features 101

These are the key fit areas of any eyeglass frame front, including the pupil location “sweet spot”. Focusing on these key areas will give you a tailored look that will work perfectly with your prescription.

1. Overall frame size

The best fit will “frame” your face. Pay attention to how the overall frame width works with the width of your face. The endpiece should match with the widest part of your face at your temples (just in front of your ears). This fit feature is more important than the size of the lens. We have many clients which focus on lens size (“I’m a 52mm lens wearer”). However, they’ll often find the overall frame size is more important than the lens size marked inside the arm of the frame.

2. Eye position

Eye position is very important not only for how your frame looks on you, but how your Rx works in that frame. Horizontally, each eye should be centered in the lens up to 5mm inside of lens center–never outside of center. Vertically, if you imagine the lens in four equal sections, your eyes should be in the 25% segment just above center-never below center and never in the top 25%.

3. Bridge fit

Comfort is key and trying on the frame is essential. Whether acetate pads that are integrated into the frame, or pads attached by metal pad arms, the nose pads should rest comfortably on the sides of your nose. The frame shouldn’t rest on your cheeks nor should the top of the frame bridge only rest on the top of your nose. This balanced fit ensures the frame fits comfortably and helps it to stay in place.

4. Frame shape

While the popular generalities around how round frames are better for square faces and vice versa, we think that is an unhelpful oversimplification. Don’t be afraid to experiment a little. Sometimes the size of a frame is much more important than the shape. For example, if you have a round face a small round frame may look great, but a large round frame doesn’t work.

5. Your prescription

There are two things to consider–your Rx power and Rx type. For low power single vision wearers, you don’t need to be concerned. For higher Rx powers (over a +/- 3.00) and/or progressive or bifocal wearers, lens size matters. High power Rx’s will want to keep the lens size as small as possible and eyes as centered as possible to help reduce lens thickness and weight.  Progressive/bifocal wearers will want to ensure your eyes are in that 25% above lens center–the deeper the frame the more room you’ll have for the distance to intermediate to reading portions.

A proper fit consists of:

• Eyes centered in the frames.
• Width of the frame that matches closely to the width of your face.
• The bridge fitting snugly on your nose.
• For more info, see this post.

Use this calculation for frame size:

Eye size + Bridge size = Frame Size. Or for example: 47mm +21mm = 68mm

Very Narrow: 65mm or less

Narrow: 66mm to 67mm

Medium: 68mm to 70mm

Wide: 70mm to 73mm

Very Wide: 74mm or more

Above is a general rule. For men, add 1-2mm, for women subtract 1-2mm

FIND A PERFECT PAIR

*This post doesn’t cover fine tuning adjustments (i.e. temple tip, panto, ear height, etc). We are able to do many of these adjustments based upon your feedback during home try-on and further fine tuning can be done by a local optician.