Shade & Temple

Sunglasses Gifts & Holiday Deals

Buying sunglasses for someone else, or waiting for a price to drop? Gift guides by recipient and by budget, the shapes that suit almost anyone, and an honest read on what actually discounts for Black Friday.

Every other section of this site is written for the person who will wear the sunglasses. This one is written for the person buying them for somebody else, which is a genuinely different problem. A wearer knows their face, their habits and what they already own. A gifter is guessing at all three, usually from across a room, and is buying a fitted object — a frame has a width and a bridge measurement the way a shoe has a size — without being able to try it on the recipient.

So the pages here are organized the way a gifter actually thinks. If you know roughly what you want to spend, start with the budget tiers: gifts under $50, where the modern budget tier is genuinely polarized and genuinely UV400 and an imperfect fit costs nobody much; gifts under $150, where a present starts to read as considered; and luxury gifts, for when budget is not the question and the lens should be worth it. If you know the person better than you know the price, start with the recipient pages instead: gifts for him, gifts for her, and gifts for the outdoor person in your life, where the activity decides the lens and the lens decides the gift.

If you have no idea where to begin, the sunglasses gift guide is the pillar: three questions to answer before you buy anything, the shapes that suit the most people, and what to include with the gift so it survives contact with a bag. And if the question is less “which pair” than “when”, the Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals hub is an honest read on which brands historically discount in November and which rarely do — and it is where we will post real deals when they go live.

Two things do not change because it is a gift. Every pair we recommend states either UV400 or 100% UVA/UVB protection, because a dark lens with no ultraviolet filter opens the wearer’s pupil and lets more UV in than no lens at all — a poor thing to wrap. And every pick is reasoned from published specifications rather than from a pair we field-tested, which we have not; how we choose explains exactly what we do instead, and every price on these pages is live and dated.

Everything in Gifts & Deals

How to buy sunglasses for someone else, in three decisions

1. What do they do outside?

This is the highest-value question and the easiest to answer without asking. Someone who fishes or boats wants polarization above everything, because it is what removes the mirror off the water. Someone who golfs wants the opposite — polarization erases the sheen off the grass that shows how a putt breaks, so a well-meant polarized gift is the wrong tool on a course. A runner wants grip and light weight. A commuter wants glare control on a wet road. Match the lens to the activity and the gift lands; our outdoor gift guide does that per activity, and what polarized sunglasses do explains the mechanism in plain terms.

2. Can you get thirty seconds with a pair they already own?

Printed inside one temple arm of almost any pair is a set of numbers like 54-18-140 — lens width, bridge width and temple length in millimeters. Buy something within a couple of millimeters of those and it will fit. If you cannot get those numbers, favor forgiving frames: rubberized grip coatings, plastic frames that flex, medium sizes rather than statement-oversized ones. Our size guide explains how to read the numbers.

3. Keepsake or workhorse?

A heritage frame is a keepsake: it will still look right in ten years and carries the weight of an obviously considered gift. A budget polarized pair is a workhorse: cheap enough to use hard, replace without pain and own in multiples. Both are good gifts. They are not the same gift, and the wrong one for the recipient feels off however much you spent. Our are expensive sunglasses worth it piece explains where the money actually goes.

The two things to include with any pair

  • A hard case, if the pair does not ship with one. The fine swirl scratches that eventually ruin a lens come from bags and pockets, not from wearing.
  • A gift receipt. Fit is the one variable you cannot control, and making an exchange easy is what turns a risky gift into a safe one.

On waiting for a sale

Whether to buy now or hold out for November depends almost entirely on the price tier. The budget brands promote all year, so the November saving on a $30 pair is a few dollars and there is little reason to wait. The heritage brands — Ray-Ban, Oakley, Costa — ran up-to-50%-off-select-styles events in each of the last few Novembers, which is real money on a $200 frame. And at least one premium brand’s most recent Black Friday offer was a free hat rather than a price cut. The Black Friday deals hub lays all of that out with the sources, product class by product class, and states plainly what we could not verify.

For the wearer’s version of every decision here — roundups by activity, the lens science, fit by face shape and brand reviews — the rest of the site is one click away: sport, lens guide, fit guide, reviews and everyday. If you want the whole field ranked in one place, start with our flagship roundup.

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