Browline glasses

Browline glasses are a style of eyeglass frames which were very popular during the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the United States of America. The name derives from the fact that the bold upper part of the frames frame the lenses in the same way that eyebrows frame the eyes. The glasses were first manufactured by Shuron Ltd. in 1947 under the "Ronsir" brand and quickly emulated by various other manufacturers. The design became the most common style of eyeglasses throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s before it was surpassed in popularity by solid plastic styles. Browlines enjoyed a renaissance as sunglasses in the 1980s before returning to popularity in the 2010s, with the rise of retro style and the hipster subculture.

Browline glasses are constructed in such a way that the upper portion of the frame is thicker than the lower portion, simulating additional eyebrows or otherwise drawing attention to the wearer's natural brow line.

The most common means of construction is for the upper portion of the frame (the "brows" or "caps") and temples to be made of plastic, with the remainder of the frame (the bridge and eyewires, or "chassis") to be made of metal. The chassis inserts into the brows and is held in place by way of a series of screws. For a period in the 1960s, numerous models emerged in which the brows were constructed from aluminium; following the style's resurgence in the 2000s, browlines made wholly out of one type of metal with less pronounced brow portions became popular.

Monobrowlines are a variant of browlines in which the bridge is contiguous with the caps, creating a solid, unbroken line across the top of the frame. The style dates back to the Shuron Stag, a browline prototype, which enjoyed some brief popularity before being replaced by the Ronsir as Shuron's flagship frame. The original stag had no metal chassis: the lenses were mounted directly to the brow caps via two sets of screws. The modern monobrowline originated in the 1980s, as part of an effort by Bausch and Lomb to diversify their Ray-Ban sunglass collection with the Wayfarer Max, a fusion of the then-popular Wayfarer and Clubmaster sunglass models. The style proved unpopular and was quickly phased out. The monobrowline design was resurrected by a variety of manufacturers in the 2010s (chiefly Oakley) after browlines returned to popularity. Unlike its tenure in the 1980s, monobrowlines proved to be a popular variant among eyeglass wearers in the 2010s.

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