Royal Hot sunglasses are not only good quality and have awesome designs but they also have the best ultraviolet protection possible (UV400). Cost wise they are really affordable starting @ $15 and going up to $50 for specialty shades. These are backed up by a 100% satisfaction guaranteed with exchange or full refund.
Each pair of Royal Hot sunglasses comes with a very cool luxury case, a cleaning cloth and a quite cool box (perfect for gifting).
From standard driving polarized shades to round steampunk sunglasses you can get almost any style of frames but the famous 1950’s 1960’s cat eye design.
What are our favorite ones? yes the steampunk frames – I am not talking about the John Lennon style of flat round lenses, I am talking about the real Steampunk. A sub-genre of science fantasy which incorporates designs inspired by 19th century industrial steam powered machines. Well alive with very cool places like the steampunk Truth Coffee in Cape Town, South Africa – I visited the place multiple times and it is a must see, the coffee is quite excellent as well.
Looking back at Royal Hot, between driving big square eyewear, round Lennon, pilot style and other rimless frames you know that your shades will be different than your best friend one.
In traditional culture, women sunglasses have unique designs like cat eye style, panthos design, or butterfly frame but that is changing. At My Small Store we realized that women love different frame designs and we offer sunglasses with total unisex styles – rectangle, oval, square, punk, round, aviator etc.
The good old days of face shape dictate your glasses design are gone – no more oval face thus square frame, sorry. Today women wear whatever style they want.
Royal Hot sunglasses come with the highest ultraviolet protection available on the market UV400 which provides 100% UVA and UVB filtering. Both are quite dangerous to human eyes.
Too much exposure to UVA is the cause of certain types of cataracts, as your cornea lets UVA pass through, it plays an important role in the development of macular degeneration. UVB is the one responsible for tanning but it causes sunburns not fun on your skin and extremely dangerous for your eyes as your cornea absorbs all UVB – thus cornea sunburns causing the famous snow blindness.
Royal Hot shades also come with polarization that helps considerably with glares and reflections from smooth surfaces. Perfect for driving, fishing and all winter activities.
Price wise, why own one pair of UV100 Julbo steampunk sunglasses at $99.98 when for the same budget you can get the same beautiful Royal Hot punk plus a pair of driving frames and a pair of classy all polarized UV400 (much better than UV100) with 100% satisfaction guaranteed and free shipping?
We all want luxury products including accessories like luxury sunglasses but we are not ready to pay $595 for a pair of Salvatore Ferragamo rectangular frame leather lined sunglasses with the classic gold logo on both temples. Are we? Maybe not and it comes with risks:
You thought you bought real Giorgio Armani but they are copycats, it’s illegal to buy fakes even if you didn’t know.
Your brand new Yves Saint Laurent shades disappear suddenly from your purse – no they do not come with a auto-vanish feature.
What to do? You really want to make a statement, feel good about your sunglasses and let’s be honest make other envious. Gucci will do that but other brands as well I am not talking about what you find in a big box store for $19.99, I’m talking about small sunglass designers like Royal Hot, Bobo Bird or Yumomo.
These designers are not well known if even known but their style are quite impressive, their prices as well. No, you can’t find them at Walmart or C&A, several few website like My Small Store sell them and many high end stores in Europe or South America – I recently traveled to Brazil where I found in the duty free area a shop selling Royal Hot eyewears tax free for $250, the exact same sold here for $29.99!
A customer sent us a picture of a Bobo Bird store in Moscow, he had to look at the price 5 times as he could not believe the price over $300 for the same pair he paid $24.99 at My Small Store. The store make people feel they are buying a top shelf luxury product that only people traveling from abroad can afford.
Do luxury accessories have to be so expensive? We don’t think so.
Look at what is important to you – the luxury brands name like Miu Miu or Miuccia Prada, the design like aviator or navigator sunglasses or cat eye, the features such as 100% UV protection and polarization or the accessories that comes with it as cool storage box, fancy glasses bag etc.
Let’s compare a little between a big luxury name like Prada and similar Yumomo cat eye shades. Look at these 2 pictures and tell me which one is Yumomo and which one is Prada – submit your answer for a $25 gift card. The Prada is sold at $350 and the Yumomo is sold for less than $30.
As we updated this post 74% of answers were wrong! Meaning the Yumomo luxury sunglasses look more luxury compared to the $350 ones. Meaning that what 74% of our readers are ready to spend $350 on a $30 pair of glasses – time to increase our prices 🙂
Another point is if you have a $350 budget for your new pair of shades, you can buy one pair of BVLGARI or Christian Dior or 10 pairs of Yumomo, Bobo Bird or Royal hot – all coming with free shipping, warranty and full refund if not satisfied.
A customers of ours tried a pair of fancy Yumomo sunglasses that made her BFF very jealous (that happens a lot), she asked us not to sell to her so she could keep her new shades quite unique. Unfortunately, we can’t do that but we remove those from our stock for a few weeks 🙂
To finish, luxury sunglasses do not have to be extremely expensive, why overpay for a brand name when there is 70% chances that your new expensive designer glasses are made in Wenzhou, China in the same factories that many brands!
Chances are that smaller designer have they own production like Bobo Bird or outsource their production to fair trade factories. Stop wondering and try a Bobo Bird, a Royal Hot or a Yumomo, you won’t regret it!
Bobo Bird manufacturing is located Northern China. It all started in 1995 when a father made a wooden watch for his son. Years later, the son created the BOBO BIRD company for his father because the watch he received on his birthday was the most special gift he had ever gotten. The name of BOBO BIRD comes from a North China local birds that their calling sounds like BO-BO.
Today Bobo Bird designs and manufactures not only beautiful and unique watch but also wallets and sunglasses subject of this post.
Why Wood Sunglasses?
First and most important, all woods are reclaimed and recycled. Maple wood, Bamboo, Zebra wood, Sandalwood, even the Zebra wood are reclaimed and recycled.
Bobo Bird wooden sunglasses are handmade, polarized, UV400 protection, some are mirrored, some have acetate frames, some are 100% wood or bamboo made. Look at our collection of the best wood sunglasses for men, women or unisex.
Why chose high level of UV protection, read our post about protective eyewear, how they work and how they are made.
Let’s look at how sunglasses are made and see how they work – according to Joe, one of My Small Store staff: “they work well” 🙂
Shades have 4 main functions:
Reduce the amount of light coming to our eyes so we don’t squint,
Block harmful ultraviolet that can cause Cataracts (UVs are often responsible for cataract surgery), Macular degeneration, Pterygium, Eye cancer to name a few,
Block or reduce glare and reflection that can impact our vision. don’t forget: sunglasses protect your eyes,
Make us look cool and fashion.
Sun Light composition
The sun light is very complex made up of many light waves. To make it simple we will review the most important ones when it comes to sunglasses. The Sun emits X-rays (don’t worry it’s a very small amount), ultraviolet, visible light, infrared – Careful, I’ll add a little but of nerdy information:
Infrared (IR) light is invisible to the eye but we can feel the heat – to learn more check the Live Science article,
Ultraviolet (UV) light is invisible, it makes black-light posters glow, give summer tans and sunburns. Unfortunately, too much exposure to UVs damages to living tissue, in our case our eyes. Ultraviolet light falls in three categories:
UVA has a frequency between 315 to 400 nm (nanometers). UVA were used in tanning booths and tanning beds, this changed when scientists realized it can cause cancer (yurk).
UVB has a frequency between 280 to 315 nm. It is known to damages DNA and causes sunburn and cancer, yet, it is needed to synthesize vitamin in the skin.
UVC has a frequency between 100 to 280 nm and is mostly absorbed by our atmosphere. It is artificially created to kill germs in water treatment plants.
Visible Light has a frequency between 380 to 780 nm – as it name says it all, it’s what human eyes can see and makes us squint but is much needed 🙂
How sunglasses lenses are made
Back in the days of mass produced sunglasses (1929), the lenses were made of glass covered with a thin layer of metal, so thin it is transparent and easy to scratch. Some designers sandwiched the layer of metal between 2 layer of glass – this process was very expensive and the layer could separate – my Grandpa had a pair of glasses who separated due to the heat and humidity. In these days we didn’t know about the effect of UV rays, the concern was mostly reducing the amount of visible light and the glare.
Glass lenses are expensive to produce, can cause lots of damage when they break. This technology was replaced by transparent plastic much cheaper to produce, almost unbreakable with a down side – they are easy to scratch. Manufacturer continue improvement with other polymers, polycarbonate and resins.
Reduction of visible light
This is done by tints and mirror coating.
We mostly chose our tinted glasses based on our style: brown, grey, blue, pink and even gold but we should think and understand the different options as the color of the tint determines the parts of the visible light spectrum that are absorbed by the lens.
Manufacturers use different colors and technologies to produce specific results:
Gray tints are strong all purpose colors that reduce the amount of brightness with the least amount of color distortion. Gray lenses offer a basic protection against glare, making them a good shade for driving and general use.
Yellow or gold tints reduce the amount of blue light while allowing a larger percentage of other color through. Blue light has tendency to bounce and scatter off a lot, it can create a kind of glare known as blue haze. These yellow tints eliminate the blue part of the spectrum thus make everything bright and sharp. Wondering why your snow glasses are yellow?
Amber and Brown tints are also good general purpose without distorting colors.
Green tints filter some blue light and reduce glare. Green tints offer the best color contrast, they are very popular.
Purple and Pink tints offer the best contrast of objects against a green or blue background. They make a good choice for hunting, fishing or water sports.
Manufacturers use a process called constant density to tint lenses. The tint is mixed with polycarbonate or resin offering an uniform color throughout the material. The color is built right into the lenses when they are created. This process is cheaper and give a longer life to the finish lenses. Very cheap sunglasses can also be made by applying a coat of light-absorbing molecules to the surface of clear polycarbonate, then a coat of scratch resistant “paint” is applied. Another technology is becoming very common is to immerse the lenses in a “special” liquid containing the tinting material. The tint is slowly absorbed into the plastic. To make a darker tint, the lenses are simply left in the liquid longer.
Mirror sunglasses are covered with a reflective coating (also called flash coating), they appear like small mirrors. The lenses typically give the user’s vision a brown or grey tint. The mirror reduces the amount of light passing through the 10–60% depending on the thickness of the coat. The color of the mirror is independent of the tint of the lenses, you can have a blue eyewear but see the world through grey lenses.
Reducing and blocking UV rays
A good pair of shades like the one My Small Store sells, blocks and should block over 99% of UVs by absorbing ultraviolet. Yes, absorbing, not reflecting.
To achieve this absorption manufacturers use UV-curable coating. Coatings are usually applied to plastic/ polycarbonate/resin substrates via spray, dip, roll, flow and other processes. Let me a nerd and try to explain the technicality of UV-curable coating 🙂
The goal is to apply ultraviolet blocker/absorbers that resist time, can be mass produced and be home used vs. lab or factory used. Scientists came up a polymeric coatings containing both UV absorbers and dyes (tints). The idea is to produce a transparent, durable film that can significantly increase the level of UV radiation blockage when coated onto glasses lenses. Smart no? One film that does it all, easy (cheap) to implement.
Why these researches? To improve the UV protection, lower the cost of manufacture and increase the life of your favorite sunglasses. All this to protect your vision!
Eliminating glare
A bit of history, polarized lenses were invented by Edwin Land in 1929. Edwin founded the Polaroid Corporation in 1937 in Cambridge, MA. The company initially produced Polaroid Day Glasses, the first sunglasses with a polarizing filter. In 1935 Land negotiated with American Optical Company to produce polarized sunglasses. Such glasses could screen out glare rather than simply darken the landscape. Land and Wheelwright contracted to begin production of Polaroid Day Glasses, a longtime source of revenue for Polaroid. I’ll write a blog post just for this feature as it has evolved considerably since 1929.
What you have to know is that visible light waves from the sun arrive in all directions, not just straight forward. When this scattered light meets a horizontal surface, like a road or water, a big part of the light bounces with horizontal polarization. Our eyes see this horizontally-polarized light as “white glare” which masks useful light to our human eyes thus reducing visibility.
We call the horizontal light, glare, scientists like to call it “visual noise”. As it reduces visibility and it can make driving, cycling, skiing dangerous. I lived 5 years in the Middle East, even though I had polarized lenses, the glare was so intense I had to stop my car on the side of the freeway and wait for the sun to go down a bit.
Do you know that the Polaroid filter for polarized sunglasses was created in 1936 and played a significant role in World War II when Ray Ban created the anti-glare pilot sunglasses?
Cool look feature
It’s all about designer, shapes and looks and colors. We chose our sunglasses types based on what we think make us look cool and sunglass designers love playing with new concepts.
Never forget that sunglasses protect your eyes from UV rays and glare!
A customer sent us a picture of a Bobo Bird store in Moscow, he had to look at the price 5 times as he could not believe the price over $300 for the same pair he paid $24.99 at My Small Store. The store make people feel they are buying a top shelf luxury product that only people traveling from abroad can afford.
