Metal -vs- Acrylic Toppers
Spoiler Alert: Metal Toppers Highly Recommended
You may have noticed on our website and on our Etsy listings that we say “Metal Toppers Highly Recommended” and wonder why we say that. Here’s a breakdown of the advantages of Metal -vs- Acrylic when it comes to getting new toppers for your Pair Eyewear glasses.
To be fair – Metal is all either of us ever wear anymore – unless they’re some of the ones we get from Pair directly. It fits our personal preferences better – but I’ll do my best to present a fair case for both styles.
Inventory: Acrylic will never be out of stock as we laser cut each blank in house. So even if we get a rush of orders – as long as we’ve got flat acrylic to cut – we’ll have that style in stock. This is why Acrylic is less expensive – we don’t have to manage or stock as much inventory. Metal blanks are imported from China and while we have a pretty good handle on inventory and when we need to reorder – when something is coming from half way around the world – it often takes a month or more for us to restock. So far – it’s not been an issue, but it does make it slower for us to get the newest styles in metal as we have to wait until we can order our minimums. Advantage: Acrylic.
Thickness/Thinness. A clear advantage to metal over acrylic is how thin the metal toppers are. They vanish onto your frames when wearing them and do not impede your field of vision at all. The metal toppers are super thin – and some people (us included) think they’re “flimsy”, but after wearing nothing but metal – we’ve not found this to be the case. It’s not like you’re taking them off and playing with them. That being said – the sturdy feel of the acrylic is comforting to some people. Our acrylic is just a tiny bit thicker than the Pair brand, though it may change if we can find a thinner acrylic that takes a good image via sublimation. Advantage: Metal
Image reproduction. We decorate our toppers using a sublimation technique. Submilation is a process that uses special inks, papers and substrates (the toppers), combined with heat and pressure that cause the image to bond at a molecular level with the substrate (topper). Metal takes an image better and will look almost identical to the mock ups that we show in our main pictures. Acrylic takes an image very well, though it’s not as glossy and may have a little bit of an image spread or a very slight blurring. This is only noticeable under intense scrutiny, but there is a difference in image quality that’s a direct result of the substrate being used. Advantage: Metal
Stackability/Magnetic Hold. This one is a mixed bag. Acrylic toppers have recessed holes for the magnets. They’re almost flush, but intentionally not perfectly flush with the back of the toppers and this keeps them from moving around on the back of the toppers. You can stack a couple of pair together – but we recommend putting our acrylic toppers on the top layer as they’re a little bit thicker than pair brand. The Metal toppers have the magnets surface mounted using permanent glue dots. We have not personally had any issues with them – and again – we wear them daily, but we’ve had people tell us that they can move or come off (if that happens – let us know and we’ll send you new magnets – or just use a drop of superglue if you’ve still got the magnet). We suspect some of those reports are from people who were “testing” the integrity of the glue. So the recessed nature of the Acrylic toppers have an advantage here, but because the metal toppers are so light, the magnets on those hold super tight and are less likely to get knocked off. You can stack a couple of metal toppers, but they’ll start to get an angle with too many. Then again – we only really stack them up for those TikTok videos, no one really wears 4 toppers stacked up. Just the sunglasses. Slight advantage to Metal for security.
Out of the box experience. When you get your acrylic toppers you may have to do some minor adjustments to make them fit your glasses perfectly. We’ve even had to do this with some of the official Pair brand toppers. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to do. The bad news is – you’ve got to do something other than just put them on your face. Metal toppers instantly mold and bend to your glasses and require no additional work. Clear Advantage: Metal
Customer Satisfaction. In selling hundreds of toppers we’ve had far fewer questions about metal toppers than we have with Acrylic. Fit, shaping and slightly less vibrant images are the questions we get about acrylic that simply don’t exist as questions about metal toppers. Our users seem to overwhelmingly favor metal toppers as well. Advantage: Metal
