My brother believes men’s sunglasses and women’s sunglasses sections are almost entirely artificial. Marketing bullshit passed off as biological fact. He’ll fight you on that hill if you let him half the time. Malcolm, a guy I used to work with on the shop floor for years – whole decade long shift together at one point – disagreed strongly, he could walk across a stockroom and tell you which section any pair of sunglasses came from just by looking at them. Kind of both right, which is infuriating about this whole question, because ultimately it’s not really about gender. Not really at all.
It’s about two different concepts getting shoehorned into the same conversation and then weirdly insisting they’re the same thing.
Ignore gender and once you separate them back out the whole thing makes a lot more sense.
The first bit is about size, and size is about faces
The first thing I’ll say on the topic, and believe me when I say I know this as someone who spent years trying to sell people frames that weren’t constructed with their face shape in mind, is that the most legitimately useful difference between men’s and women’s sunglasses is size. Men’s frames are typically wider across the front, have a longer arm and bigger lenses because on average men have wider faces and more temple to ear distance. Women’s frames are narrower and shorter on those measurements because on average women have narrower faces. That’s it. There’s no grand statement about what makes us feel masculine or feminine about this, it’s literally just someone making two sets of the same basic shape in different sizes and labelling them so you don’t have to think about it yourself.
The thing that trips people up, and tricked me for years before it occurred to me, is that “on average” is a powerful phrase there and there are plenty of actual human faces which fall nowhere close to the average of their perceived gender. Mine’s on the narrower side for a guy, I spent a significant portion of the 2000s wearing sunglasses that were ‘men’s sunglasses’ and many, many degrees too wide for my face so that they slid down my nose every time I looked at my phone because why would I think that women’s sunglasses might actually fit me? Malcolm measured customers. Actual bridge width. Actual temple length. More times than either of us liked he’d have them try something from the ‘wrong’ section entirely because the maths worked out better there.
I’ve watched men walk out happy in what were unquestionably women’s frames because they fit their face and women walk out happy in men’s frames for the exact same reason, and trust me when I say neither of them cared once they weren’t gloomsters and actually could see. If you’re looking at a pair of sunglasses trying to work out if they’re men’s or women’s, the one useful measurement is not going to be “do they look masculine?” or “do they look feminine?” It’s going to be whether the bridge fits where your own nose bridge is and whether the arms reach your ears without either squeezing at your head or leaving so much space you could fold a piece of paper into a paper aeroplane between them. That is a question of fit first and gender only as an afterthought, and I’ll argue that’s far and away the bigger of the two considerations because if a pair are the “wrong” shape for your face but the right scale they’ll drive you mad every time you wear them but if they’re technically from the opposite section but fit perfectly they’ll just work.
After that…there’s shape, and shape is where all the labelling comes in
The second half of it, and the bit Malcolm was honing in on when he could look at a pair and know their display home, is straight-up convention of shape and this is very much the portion of the men’s and women’s divide that does fall into gender lines. Men’s sunglasses tend towards straighter top bars, squarer or angular lenses, thicker arms and darker finishes on the frames themselves. Women’s sunglasses bend their top bars, go with rounder lenses or oversized eyes, skinnier arms often with detail on the temple itself, and almost every colour and finish fancy invented including but not limited to coloured arms, patterned finishes, diamante bits on the hinges, etcetera. Neither of those are by accident, both of them are design dialects that attached themselves to a label a long time ago and haven’t really fallen away since.
What’s interesting, and where credit where credit’s due and I’ll give my brother this; it’s started to shift without anyone officially deciding to do so. Aviators used to be rigidly, aggressively masculine. Military issue for decades and hard to find a women’s version up until quite recently. Now they’ll patrol both sides of the shop floor and calling one specifically men’s or women’s just feels ridiculous. Oversized circles would’ve been Girl Turbans™ twenty years ago and now you’ll see men wear them all the time and nobody thinks twice about it. I described a pair of giant square frames as “women’s silhouette done wrong” about three seconds after looking at them through the window of a shop last year and then watched literally three guys walk out wearing them and asking if I wanted to try them on.
Minds were blown all around.
Truthfully what I’d suggest to someone who was stood there actually trying to pick a pair out, rather than roast on a heap of rules that aren’t even fully accurate any more, is that shape is the one category you can genuinely argue with if you want to.
A boxier, angular frame carries a reading and a softer, rounder frame carries another no matter where you pull it from and that’s aesthetic choice you’re perfectly entitled to make. Fit and size, on the other hand? Don’t argue with that. Because that isn’t trying to make a style statement at all, that’s just whether or not the sunglasses will stay on your face or slip down it whenever you nod. The labels exist in a fuzzier state than most of us would think half the time. Malcolm could spot the trend because he was looking for it. You can too. Doesn’t change the fact that once you separate size and shape all that’s doing is fitting your head and what you call it doesn’t matter.
