Silhouette Glasses – Are They Worth It?


Silhouette produces high quality eyewear since 1964 in Austria. In this article we will tell you our experience with Silhouette glasses. We will talk about the experiences of us as opticians who process Silhouette glasses and our customers who wear the glasses.

The most outstanding point is the light weight of Silhouette glasses. There are some glasses in the collection that weigh only 10g even with lenses in your prescription. This makes Silhouette glasses especially attractive to those customers who prefer the most minimalist design possible in their glasses.

The iconic Minimal Art glasses were launched in 1999 and even today these models are still available at Silhouette. You can find them in the TMA (Titan Minimal Art) collection. The other models are also clearly influenced by the Minimal art. That is why the glasses are loved by some customers. Hardly anything comes close to the lightness and flexibility of Silhouette.

However, these incredibly fine shapes in the glasses also bring their disadvantages. Broken temples or nose bridges are more often visible compared to other manufacturers whose frames weigh 4-5g more or use different materials.

Please do not misunderstand me. Silhouette glasses are great but let’s start with the disadvantages.

Typical Failure Points of the Very Delicate Silhouette Frames

In the extremely delicate structures, especially in the glasses without a hinge, the temples break more often directly in the place before the temple is rolled. The glasses seem indestructible for many customers in the first moment, but it is not at all.even if the glasses are only on and off, the material must permanently spring. The same applies to the storage in the case. The Silhouette glasses have namely some tension when the glasses are put inside.

Of course, there are also very many Silhouette glasses that still function optimally after twenty years. however, with glasses that are sold very often, you can see certain patterns where something breaks. In the Silhouette glasses you can interrupt this in three places.

  • The temple breaks directly at the point where it was rolled
  • The nose pad breaks at the bridge
  • The coating peels off

Of course, there were other places that could be seen defective at one time. But these three points came up again and again. I have seen significantly fewer problems with the sockets that have a hinge. There were significantly fewer problems and breakages here.

The problem with the paint coating on the temples coming off was also much less common here. For this reason, I much rather recommend such a model today are the vast majority of glasses from Silhouette equipped with hinges.

The image shows the typical failure point in Silhouette frames.

Silhouette glasses are very well made and the holes for the glasses can always be placed in the intended places, which speaks for a high quality of the frames. In addition, the glasses are very easy to adjust. Problematic is the whole with the lightweight glasses only from Silhouette when extremely stage lenses must be used. The delicate frames actually bounce visibly and the glasses sometimes start to bounce slightly.

This is only happens in rare cases. But what happens very often is that people who are very sensitive on the nose want to use Silhouette because the glasses are so light. One is to keep the weight so low when it comes to sensitivity to pressure. The other is to distribute the weight as optimally as possible on the nose.

Silhouette has several types of nose pads, but the choice is limited. Sometimes, even with very light glasses, the wearers still have visible marks on the nose. With larger pads or those that have an air cushion or gel cushion built in can fix something like that. However, such special pads can not be mounted on the Silhouette frame.

However, your optician can assess this in advance. The steeper the nose flanks are in relation to each other, the more pressure you will experience from the nose pads despite very light glasses.

Prices for Silhouette Frames

Prices for Silhouette frames cost between $250 and $400. The prices depend on the model.

My Experience With Frames From Silhouette

My experience with Silhouette is generally very good purely when it comes to the frames. The glasses are real high end products that are very trimmed for lightness and high wearing comfort. I would only wish that there would be the possibility to mount other nose pads if someone is really very sensitive to pressure.

In addition, on the part of the manufacturer is very quickly concluded to a handling error if something is defective. This behavior I can not understand in such a premium product especially if the optician complains about a place repeatedly and that does not look like a mistake by the customer but a mistake in the design.

In our optical store we hardly have Silhouette in the program. Not because the products are bad, but because the experiences when there were problems were not so optimal for us or our customers.

In fact, I would not make you a Silhouette glasses therefore madig. there are few glasses that allow such a high wearing comfort. Certainly there are also very vie cheaper plagiarism, but to those I would not advise, because the workmanship here is much worse and the risk of breakage definitely increases.

Recent Posts