This week I want to talk about sustainable and ethical eyewear. And in particular about blue light glasses, as I’ve tried them over the past few weeks and to me they’re a great solution to my after-work-headaches. polette has reached out to me to try out their blue light glasses from their sustainable eyewear range, which has been an absolute pleasure to do so. In this article I’ll take you with me on how and why I use polette’s glasses.
Why I wanted to try blue light glasses
Maybe you’ve followed this story along on Instagram, but if you don’t, let me just really quickly recapture it. Last January I started a new job: full of excitement and joy I started working almost full time as a marketing manager. After working freelance for almost a year, I took on this new job at a local company. Basically form the start I really loved this new job, however, I really needed to get used to staring at a screen so many hours a day.
Since I was 5, I’ve been very sensitive to headaches and migraines in particular. So whenever I start doing something new, I have to adjust to it for weeks. This has been no exception to my new job. Every day I’d finish my day, I’d leave the office with some irritating migraines or office headaches. On Instagram I then asked you for help and many people came with the idea to try blue light glasses. This is how the search for sustainable and ethical blue light glasses obviously began.
In one of my earliest blog posts, I already talked about sustainable and ethical sunglasses, so I had some sort of starting point for the blue light glasses.
A little bit about polette
polette is a Dutch eyewear brand with roots in France and China. Every pair of glasses is designed with the utmost care and with the end-user in mind; in the end glasses are a necessity, not only a fashion item. However, this doesn’t stop them from doing their best to fight the polluting fashion industry. With polette’s zero-stock policy they actively prevent waste, as well as unnecessary use of energy and water. Every pair of glasses is ethically made to order in China and is therefore uniquely made just for you. Personally I love the made-to-order concept; I believe this is the future, as it’s indeed the perfect way to save resources and produce only what is needed.
polette takes their environmental commitment even one step further with their Eco and Recycled Acetate collection. By the end of 2021, polette will have 100% of its acetate catalog made exclusively of sustainable materials.
What are sustainable glasses?
But what actually makes this eyewear collection by polette so sustainable? Before we can answer this question, let me shortly explain why glasses can be unsustainable in the first place.
Why glasses are often unsustainable
Most glasses nowadays are plastic mass produced frames, that become a throw-away item almost immediately after you bought it. Why plastic is bad, is probably something I don’t have to explain you. But maybe you didn’t know that the protective packaging of glasses is quite often very unsustainable. Or that frame manufacturing is currently quite a wasteful industry, as most off-cuts and imperfect frames cannot easily be re-worked back into the production stream and find their way into landfill sites across the globe (Source: HealthAwareness).
How polette makes sustainable eyewear
As I already mentioned before, polette works with a made-to-order system, to reduce excessive overstock. But besides that, they work with sustainable materials, such as eco and recycled acetate and minimal packaging.
A material like eco-acetate allows polette to create glasses that are better for the environment, without sacrificing the possibilities of design and creativity. Frames made from eco acetate can have bright & pop colors, see through effects, opaque or even blurry effects. At the end of their useful life, these glasses made from plant seeds and are biodegradable up to 60% after 150 days. Most importantly, eco-acetate frames contain less than 1% of very harmful diethyl phthalate (DEP).
As for the recycled acetate, it’s championing the re-use of existing resources. polette is committed to minimising waste and maximising resources: that’s polette for the planet. That’s why polette also recycles all leftovers of acetate (the offcuts, scraps, defects and deformed acetates) to create new glasses.
And this is what makes polette so sustainable and ethical.
How I like the blue light glasses by polette
To be honest, I’ve been slightly sceptical to try blue light glasses. Even though I know there are so many people out there who experienced many benefits of it, I needed to try it for myself first.
So the first night I tried my polette blue light glasses, I already challenged them quite a bit. I have had a long day at work, and I did come home with some office headaches irritating me. But especially because of this all, I decided it was a great way to give them a try. I’ve worn them at night whilst watching a movie with my bf. Normally when I come home from work, I really have to avoid screens, but with these blue light blocking glasses, my eyes weren’t triggered as much. After a while I discovered that I therefore also relaxed the muscles in my face much more and my headache started to fade away.
And this has been one of the best advantages of my polette glasses: when I’m wearing them, I’m able to relax my eyes and face muscles so much more, that eventually headaches fade away. When I’m working from home, I wear these glasses all day and they do prevent irritating headaches.
My recommendation
Would I recommend the sustainable eyewear range by polette? Definitely. Besides supporting such an innovative and ethical company, I also believe in their products and the quality they’re able to deliver. So when you’re looking for eco blue light blocking glasses, or other sustainable eyewear, you should give polette a try. polette ships worldwide.
