Choosing glasses frames for your colouring

Frames are the only thing in this whole system you wear on your face rather than near it. A shirt sits four inches from your jaw and a lipstick covers a few square centimetres; a pair of glasses sits directly across the part of your face people look at, and you wear it every day for two or three years. By the measure this site actually uses — colour multiplied by proximity multiplied by how often — frames outrank almost everything in a wardrobe.

Which makes it strange how little colour advice exists for them. Most of what is written about choosing glasses is about face shape. That matters, and it is a different question from this one.

Two decisions, not one

A frame makes two colour claims at the same time and they can be separated.

The front sits against your temples, your brow and the skin under your eyes. That is the piece doing what a collar does, and it answers to your palette.

The temples and inner rim are barely visible on your own face and are mostly seen by you in a mirror. Plenty of frames put a second colour there, which is why a frame that is wrong from the front can still be a frame you like holding.

Judge the front. That is the whole rule, and it is why trying frames on in a shop with your hair down and the shop's overhead light on tells you less than you think.

The temperature question comes first

Frame colour splits along temperature before anything else, and the two big families are easy to name once you know to look.

Warm frames: tortoiseshell in its amber and honey versions, warm browns, horn, olive, warm gold metal, bronze, copper.

Cool frames: black, grey, gunmetal, silver, slate blue, cool plum, clear crystal with a blue cast, and the cool tortoiseshells — the ones where the dark pieces are near-black and the light pieces are grey or taupe rather than amber.

"Tortoiseshell" is not one thing, and this is the single most useful sentence on this page. The pattern is a pattern; the temperature is set by what colours are in it. A warm tortoise and a cool tortoise on the same shelf look like variations of one frame and behave like opposites on a face. Hold both up and the difference stops being subtle immediately.

If you are not certain which side you are on, the undertone guide covers the tests worth doing and the ones that are folklore.

Then depth, which is where most frame mistakes actually happen

Temperature decides which shelf. Depth decides whether the frame is louder than your face.

A frame is a hard, continuous line drawn across your features. If it is much darker than your own colouring, it becomes the first thing anyone sees and your eyes become the second. That is the real reason heavy black frames overwhelm some people and suit others: it is not the shape and it is not the size, it is that the frame is carrying more contrast than the face behind it.

Light and soft colouring — the light and soft seasons — do best with frames whose depth is close to their own. Mid-tone tortoise, taupe, warm grey, rose gold, or a rimless or semi-rimless frame that removes the line entirely. A heavy dark front is the classic error here, and it is usually bought because it looked strong on the display head.

Deep and bright colouring — the deep, true and bright seasons — can carry a frame with real weight, and often look under-dressed in a delicate one. This is the colouring that black acetate was designed for, and it is roughly the same population that black works on generally.

Everyone else sits in between and wants a mid-depth frame with visible colour in it rather than a neutral: a true tortoise, an olive, a plum, a navy.

What to do about the second pair

Sunglasses and reading glasses are the same decision with one extra variable. A dark lens sits across your eyes and removes them from the composition entirely, which raises how much the frame is doing. If your everyday frame is at the top of the depth you can carry, your sunglasses should step back from it rather than match it.

Lens tint has its own temperature and it lands on the skin around your eyes: grey and blue-grey lenses read cool, brown and amber lenses read warm. If you have gone to the trouble of choosing a frame in your temperature, a lens fighting it is an odd place to give the advantage back.

How to test a frame properly in a shop

Optician lighting is worse than retail lighting: it is bright, overhead, and usually cool fluorescent, which flatters cool frames and makes warm ones look muddy. Every frame decision made under it is being made in the wrong light.

Do three things. Take your two shortlisted frames to the shop window or the door and look at them in daylight — the same door test that works on a garment works here. Push your hair back off your face, because hair beside a frame changes the reading and you will not always be wearing it that way. And use your own phone camera rather than the mirror for the final comparison: the mirror shows you a face you have been correcting for your whole life, and a photograph does not.

Look at the same three places as always — under the eyes, around the mouth, the whites of the eyes. A frame in your temperature and near your depth makes the eyes the loudest thing in the picture. A frame fighting either one makes the frame the loudest thing.

The honest limit

Face shape, prescription and lens thickness are all real constraints and none of them are colour questions. A strong prescription limits how large and how rimless a frame can be, and no palette overrules that. Nor does this page know what frames are stocked where you live — the useful outcome is that you walk in able to reject two-thirds of the wall on sight and try the rest properly.

If you have not resolved your season yet, the three questions take about a minute and give you a temperature and a depth, which is exactly the pair of facts a frame decision needs.