Gamine by eye size: an independent brand, and which frames fit a smaller face

Gamine began in 2016 in New York, and by the brand's own account it began as a dare. A friend challenged Sergei Zubkouski, who had come out of an art school rather than the eyewear trade, to draw a pair of sunglasses. He did, and the brand is still his: its site says each collection is conceived and designed by its sole founder and designer, and that it is now based between New York and Paris. That is a short story, and it explains the frames better than a longer one would.

What the brand makes, in its own words, are small architectural pieces — clean lines, geometric shapes, gender-neutral by intent. Two consequences of that show up on the bench straight away. The first is that the fronts are drawn small. Across the Gamine frames we hold, the eye size runs from 41mm to 48mm, and several are narrow enough to carry our Narrow tag. There is nothing here at 52 or 54mm. If you have spent years being handed frames that sit wide of your temples and walk down your nose by lunchtime, that is the reason to read on.

The second is that the geometry is literal. The Nakazakicho is the geometric one: a front drawn with straight edges where most acetate is rounded off. The Persta, the Shinjuku, the Sodermalm and the Tulum are round.

The rest is quickly said. Every one is new and unworn, with demo lenses in it, and every listing records them as made in Italy. The table below gives each one's price. There is one of each, in one colour, at one size. That is true of nearly everything in the shop, and it is worth saying plainly: when a Gamine frame here sells, that colour in that size has gone from us.

Gamine does not give its frames a number and a letter. It gives them a place. The brand says its names carry the spirit of different global neighbourhoods, and that the ideas come from traffic signs in Tokyo, conversations in Brooklyn, flea market finds in Belleville. Once you know that, the collection reads as a map rather than a catalogue.

Most of ours follow the pattern plainly. The brand's own page for the Nakazakicho points at the Nakazakicho district in Osaka; the Shinjuku at the Shinjuku district in Japan; the Sodermalm at Stockholm's Södermalm, which the brand describes as the nonconformist corner of a city known for clean lines; and the Tulum at Tulum Beach. The Persta is not a place at all. The brand's page for it is the Gamine x Persta, a frame drawn with Persta, a Parisian jeweller, and we list it under the shorter name it reached us with.

Then there is a code. Every Gamine listing here carries one — NZH.5HN, SDM.5GD, TLM.2GD.PK, SNJ.4DBU — and the letters in front are an abbreviation of the model and what follows is the colourway. The Persta's code, GXP.2, follows it too, once you know GXP stands for Gamine x Persta. If you are comparing what we hold against a photograph you have seen elsewhere, the code is the thing to compare. The model name alone will not tell you which colour you are looking at, because most of these shapes exist in several.

Our own stock numbers are separate again, six figures long, and they are ours rather than the brand's. They are useful if you telephone one of the shops and want us to put our hands on a particular frame.

What a name will not tell you is the size, and with Gamine the size is the thing that decides it. The table below sorts every one we hold by eye size.

The eye size runs from 41mm to 48mm. Here it is, smallest front first.

The Persta and the Shinjuku are both 41mm across the eye. The Persta in Gold / Silver is a round metal frame measured 41–22–135: about 104mm across the lenses and the nose, on short 135mm temples, with a lens 39mm deep. The Shinjuku in Dark Blue is also round, 41–24–148, so about 106mm across but on 148mm temples, with a 38mm lens. Same eye size, two different heads: the Persta is a short-templed frame for a small one, the Shinjuku a small front on a long arm.

Then the Nakazakicho in Horn Pattern, 43–21–148, about 107mm across, lens 39mm deep. It is faceted, and its bridge is 21mm.

Above those there is a gap. The next frame up is 47mm across the eye and about 117mm across the front, ten millimetres more than the Nakazakicho, which on a face is the difference between small and ordinary.

Then the wider frames: the Tulum in Gold / Pink at 47–23–145, about 117mm across with a 45mm lens; and the Sodermalm in Glossy Gold at 48–21–140, also about 117mm across but on a 21mm bridge, the same as the Nakazakicho, and a 43mm lens.

Across the front is eye size twice plus the bridge, and it is approximate: it ignores the thickness of the rims at the hinges, so a chunky acetate reads a millimetre or two bigger than the arithmetic suggests. Use it to compare frames with each other rather than as a figure to measure your own head against.

The Nakazakicho in Horn Pattern is acetate all through. The brand states on its product pages that it works in cellulose acetate, so the colour is in the material rather than painted onto it.

The Sodermalm in Glossy Gold and the Persta in Gold / Silver are metal. The brand's page for the Sodermalm gives its material as 316 medical stainless steel, with acetate ear tips. Steel holds an adjustment, and it holds a shape at a thickness acetate could not. That is the whole argument for a metal frame: less material between the eye and the world, and a front that can be trued up on a bench when it goes out of true.

The Tulum in Gold / Pink and the Shinjuku in Dark Blue are combination frames, where each material does the job it is better at — the metal holds the line and takes the adjustment, the acetate carries the colour and the bulk. The brand describes the Tulum as acetate on metal with three zirconium stones set into the metal bridge, and describes the Shinjuku as having 18k gold-plated nose pads and circles.

Every one is listed here as made in Italy. The brand's own site does not state a country of manufacture, so take that from our listings rather than from them.

The Persta, the Shinjuku, the Sodermalm and the Tulum are round. A round frame puts no corner anywhere, so it contradicts a square jaw and a straight brow rather than repeating them, and it tends to look deliberate on a face that already has angles in it. On a rounder face it does the opposite and agrees with what is there. That is not a rule, and plenty of people wear the agreement on purpose. But if you have tried round frames and felt they softened you more than you wanted, the faceted Nakazakicho is the answer to that.

The Nakazakicho is the geometric one: a faceted front with flat planes. It reads as drawn rather than moulded. A faceted front gives a face a horizontal line to work with, which is the usual reason to reach for one, and because the planes catch light at different angles it does not look flat, even in a quiet horn pattern.

Shape matters less than width, and it is worth being blunt about that. A round frame ten millimetres too wide will look wrong in a way no shape-matching fixes, while a well-sized frame in a shape somebody once told you not to wear will usually look fine. Get the front width right first, using the numbers in the chapter above, and then choose between round and faceted on how you want to be read.

Across our stock, the bridge runs from 21mm to 24mm. The Nakazakicho and the Sodermalm are 21mm; the Persta is 22mm; the Tulum is 23mm; the Shinjuku is 24mm. A bridge too narrow for you pinches and leaves a mark; one too wide lets the frame settle down onto the cheeks and take its weight in the wrong place. If you own a frame that fits, measure its bridge and start there, because three millimetres across that span is a great deal more than it sounds.

Temples run 135mm to 148mm, a wide spread. The Persta is short at 135mm. Short suits a small head, because a long temple on a small head has to bend hard behind the ear to do anything at all. The Sodermalm is 140mm, the Tulum 145mm, and the Nakazakicho and Shinjuku are both 148mm. A metal temple can be reshaped along its length; an acetate one can be warmed and eased at the bend, but it cannot be lengthened.

Lens height runs from 38mm to 45mm: 38mm on the Shinjuku, 39mm on the Nakazakicho and Persta, 43mm on the Sodermalm and 45mm on the Tulum. That figure is the depth of the lens from the top rim to the bottom rim, and it decides two things: how much of your face the frame covers, and whether there is room for anything other than a single-vision lens.

Where a frame has metal nose pads they can be moved, which is the cheapest fit adjustment there is; the brand's page for the Shinjuku describes 18k gold-plated nose pads. An acetate bridge is fixed in shape. That is not a fault, but it is why getting the bridge width right matters more on the acetate frames than on the metal ones.

Three things, in order.

Depth first. If you wear varifocals, the lens needs enough height for the corridor, and the Shinjuku, at 38mm, is shallow. The Nakazakicho and Persta are 39mm. The Tulum at 45mm and the Sodermalm at 43mm give more to work with. What counts as enough depends on the lens design your optician uses, so take the number to them rather than deciding from it yourself.

Width second. Across the front, ours run from about 104mm to about 117mm. A prescription is ground around the centres of your pupils, and the further those centres sit from the centres of the lenses, the more work the lens has to do out at the edges. A narrow front is an advantage there if your own measurement is narrow, and a disadvantage if it is not.

Thickness third. On a stronger prescription a small lens is a real help, because there is less distance from centre to edge for the lens to thicken across. That is the practical case for a 41mm or 43mm eye beyond how it looks, and it is why we point people at the small end of this brand more often than they expect.

Every one arrives with demo lenses in it, which are plain blanks that hold the shape in transit and are meant to be replaced. We sell frames only. We do not make prescription lenses online. If you want lenses in one of these, bring it to us in Arlington or Dumfries and we will measure and glaze it, or take it to your own optician with your prescription. Any competent dispenser can work from these frames, and a new, unworn frame with its demo lenses still in is exactly what they want handed to them.

The table on this page gives the price of every Gamine frame we hold. Every one is new and unworn — that is the condition recorded on every one of these listings — and every one ships with the demo lenses in place.

We hold one of each: no duplicates and no size runs. When one sells it is gone, in the plain sense that we had one and now we do not.

If you are buying at a distance, the honest way to do it is to measure a frame you already own and like. The numbers are usually printed on the inside of a temple in the form 41–22–135, and if they are not there, any optician will read them off in a minute. Compare the eye size and the bridge against the table. Then look at the temple length, because that is the number people forget and it is the one that decides whether a frame stays where you put it.

If you are near enough, come and try one on instead. Half an hour with a frame on your face settles questions a page of millimetres cannot: whether the bridge sits where it should, whether a faceted front suits your brow, whether 41mm reads as neat or as small on you. Tell us which one before you come and we will have it out on the bench. We will adjust whatever you buy, and we will go on adjusting it.

And if none of these is right, tell us the numbers you need. Knowing you want a 44mm eye with a 21mm bridge and a 140mm temple is far more use to us than knowing you want something small.