Illesteva sunglasses-turned-prescription glasses
It’s always funny to me when this site suddenly becomes a little digital hub for something completely and totally random. For example: At present, a solid 5% of Ramshackle Glam’s daily traffic comes from people in search of information on the glasses that Ali Wong wears in Baby Cobra. This makes sense to me both because they are fantastic glasses, and also because they’re not actually glasses. They’re sunglasses. That either Ali Wong or her stylist had made into prescription glasses. Which means that searching for them online is a bit trickier than you might imagine (enter: Ramshackle Glam!).
Which brings me to this little life hack.
I love glasses. I do not, however, love *boring* glasses; I need my glasses to be on the enormous-verging-on-obnoxious side. Unfortunately, experience has shown me that glasses of the more avant-garde sort tend to be silly-expensive (witness, for example, my first foray into the world of high-drama prescription glasses, which set me back a cool $400-not-including-the-lenses). Except I thought about this for a minute, and realized that really, all I want is for my prescription glasses to have the same strong, graphic shapes as my sunglasses. And sunglasses in interesting shapes are available at virtually all price ranges.
And so now here is what I do: I buy sunglasses off of TheRealReal at a major discount (because do I care if the lenses are scratched? I do not!), and then I mosey over to Lenscrafters with them and have a pair of prescription lenses put in to the tune of $70. The only caveat to keep in mind: While any frame shape works for this (except for rimless, obviously), be careful not to choose a lens shape that’s too out-of-the-ordinary, or you may be out of luck when it comes to replacing them.
Some RG-approved frames from TheRealReal for your sunglasses-to-glasses consideration:
