Sapphire Eyewear Review: What to Know Before You Buy
Sapphire Eyewear is an online glasses retailer that operates out of the United States and Ireland. The company has a heavy focus on selling glasses with quality blue light blocking lenses.
It has a good online reputation and donates a pair of glasses to developing countries, such as Zambia, for each pair the company sells.
How Do They Work?
Sapphire Eyewear is an online eyewear retailer that focuses on selling glasses with blue light blocking lenses. Their stated goal has been to produce premium eyewear that can help prevent people from developing eye strain, headaches, and sleep issues as a result of exposure to blue light from things like bright computer screens.
What Do They Offer?
Sapphire Eyewear sells adult glasses, kids’ glasses, sunglasses, and transition glasses. Their frames often come in a wide variety of colors, although their lenses are more limited in their customization options than is seen with some other retailers. This is likely because their model is heavily focused on producing quality blue light blocking lenses.
For every pair of glasses sold, the company donates a pair of glasses to developing countries such as Zambia.
Pros & Cons
Sapphire Eyewear seems to have focused on selling blue light blocking glasses at an affordable price and largely succeeded. While cheaper glasses are available elsewhere, cheaper blue light blocking glasses could be harder to find.
Shipping is free to the USA and many other countries with Sapphire Eyewear, which is always appreciated. Unlike some other online retailers, this free shipping doesn’t appear to require one to meet some requisite total cost of a given purchase in order to qualify.
We found comparing costs a bit difficult, as how different lens options affected price isn’t well advertised. You must manually click on options and see how the prices change. The company lacks many lens customization options you can find elsewhere, so customers looking for especially feature-rich lenses may need to shop elsewhere.
Cost & Insurance
Adult frame pricing seems to bottom out at about $44. Keeping in mind all lenses block blue light, non-prescription lenses don’t affect the total cost of the purchase. Ready reader lenses add $28 to the total cost regardless of power. Prescription lenses add $84 to the total cost, with distance and reader lenses both available.
Assuming you have vision insurance and are buying prescription glasses from Sapphire Eyewear, it will usually qualify as an out-of-network provider. This means you can likely get some of the cost of your purchase reimbursed by your insurance company, but you must manually submit a claim. This process is usually pretty simple but can vary slightly company to company.
If getting your costs covered is important, make sure to research this process ahead of time. Not all purchases can be reimbursed and the level to which purchases are reimbursed can vary.
How Do They Compare Pricewise to Competitors?
Approximately $84 for prescription blue light blocking lenses is a pretty competitive price. Admittedly, this is in addition to the cost of the frames.
The company has a solid reputation, so you can make a purchase from Blue Sapphire and be fairly confident you are getting something that you couldn’t easily get cheaper elsewhere without some drop in quality or features.
Shipping Information
Sapphire Eyewear offers free shipping to the U.S. as well as to a variety of other countries. This is somewhat standard with online eyewear retailers, although some only offer this if a purchase is over a certain cost.
How Does Ordering Work?
Because they don’t have as many lens customization options as some other companies offer, Sapphire Eyewear orders are especially easy to make. Choose your frames, select from the lens options available on that same screen, and make sure you input an accurate prescription if you’re buying prescription lenses.
The only real caveat is that you need to make sure your country is set correctly, as the company operates internationally and isn’t U.S.-based. We noticed some prices had the incorrect currency symbol, but the actual number given was the correct amount (so a number might read 84€ but actually was $84).
Reviews & Brand Reputation
Sapphire Eyewear doesn’t seem to have a big online presence, but it reviews well, getting a total of 4.88 stars out of 5 on Judge.me from a total of 192 reviews. Customers seem to largely be getting what they ordered and getting it on time, with many praising the blue light blocking quality of their lenses.
Is This Brand Worth It?
Sapphire Eyewear is an option worth considering if you want glasses that block blue light. While the dangers of blue light are sometimes overly exaggerated, the company seems to avoid making unrealistic claims about the generally temporary harm blue light can cause. They sell glasses that can help reduce the issues blue light causes, and customers seem to be largely happy with them.
Alternatives to Consider
You can definitely get prescription glasses for cheaper from other retailers, although you may have a hard time getting quality blue light blocking glasses at a similar price point to what Sapphire Eyewear can offer.
Here are some alternatives to consider, however, if you are looking specifically for blue light blocking glasses:
- ROKA Eyewear
- Felix Gray
- Warby Parker
- Look Optic
References
Sapphire Eyewear. Sapphire Eyewear.
About Us. Sapphire Eyewear.
Free Shipping Policy. Sapphire Eyewear.
Sapphire Eyewear. Judge.me.
The Best Places to Buy Glasses Online of 2023. USA Today.
Blue Light Filtering Ophthalmic Lenses: A Systematic Review. (October 2021). Seminars in Ophthalmology.
Blue‐Light Filtering Spectacle Lenses for Visual Performance, Sleep, and Macular Health in Adults. (January 2019). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.The Long-Term Effect of Blue-Light Blocking Spectacle Lenses on Adults’ Contrast Perception. (July 2022). Frontiers in Neuroscience.