Don’t choose a funky comical pair of glasses if you are only buying one pair! Chances are, you'll probably also need to wear them to school, church, interviews, on the train and busses and every day to work. You know best what your everyday style is: Smart business or jeans and T-shirts, etc so choose something that matches most of your moods.

Construction of frame varies with different materials.

You'll need to select plastic, metal or a combination of both. For folk who are tough on glasses and don’t care for them as they should consider metal frames because they usually last longer, particularly stainless steel and titanium, which is also nice if you think you'll want to keep the frames a long time and just get new lenses when needed. Because most metal frames have adjustable nose pads, they work well for people whose noses are too small or large for plastic frames. If you're allergic to any metals, but have your heart set on a metal frame, make sure to get one that's hypoallergenic. Also, you might want to take into account the kind of jewellery you like to wear: if you wear a lot of gold, you might not want silver-coloured frames and vice versa.

Plastic frames tend to be less expensive and feel lighter on your face. They usually need less maintenance than metal ones, but certain types of plastic contract and expand with temperature changes and require more frequent adjustments.

Do you tend to accidentally break things a lot? If so, you might want to look into flexible hinges, which are more indestructible than regular hinges. For example, you can bend the temples (the side "arms") out more than you can with regular hinges.

Alloy, stainless steel, memory titanium, and memory plastic.

Alloy

The most popular
Most of the metal eyeglass frames, including most of the very expensive designer brand frames, sold in the world are made of what is called nickel silver alloy in the trade. Oddly enough nickel silver usually has very little if no silver at all but is an alloy of mostly copper, nickel, zinc, and iron. This fairly durable metal holds its shape well, and can be plated easily to a wide variety of colours, it has relatively low material cost and is easy to manufacture, hence its popularity for eyeglass frames. A downside is that about 10% of the population has at least some minor allergy to nickel, but since these frames are almost always colour electroplated, they shield and protect the nickel from touching the skin. However, the parts that do rest on the skin, like the nose pads and temple tips are usually of plastic anyway.
Our Cosmo range of nickel silver frames have high quality electroplated finish and have hypoallergenic soft plastic nose pads and plastic temple tips for maximum comfort.

Our Cosmo range of stainless steel frames, compared to our alloy frames, are much lighter, and far more durable, stronger, flexible, and corrosion resistant. These frames are a steel and chrome alloy and unlike nickel silver alloy are hypoallergenic. Stainless steel is harder to manufacture into eyeglass frames than alloy and hence these frames are more expensive so they tend to be used less often.

Memory titanium frames

The Cosmo range of memory titanium frames use some of the very latest SMA (Shape Memory Alloy) technology and are extremely flexible, light, and durable. Memory titanium is a special titanium alloy belonging to the SMA family. Although SMA was discovered more than 70 years ago the modern SMA mixes are quite extraordinary.

Memory plastic frames

Our memory plastic frames uses the latest plastic technology to produce a very light, extremely flexible frame with a strong shape memory similar to metal alloy SMA's. This material, unlike most plastics, does not stretch or shrink when heated, and the colour is impregnated into the resin so it will not scratch, chip, or wear off.