1 The lenses coming out of the tint bath
Hello,
We recently splashed out here at Dead Men’s Spex and bought a new tint bath, we already had one so now we have doubled our capacity for colour! In case you don’t know, a tint bath isn’t something you wash in, it’s a device used to colour lenses. As I am always a bit fanciful, I think of it as a magical process! The joy of having two tint baths is that we now have a permanent set up of eight different vats thus avoiding the faff of decanting different dyes into jars when we need another colour. Our current selection of dyes includes; brown, grey, purple, pink, green, blue and a neutraliser.
2 The lenses cooling and waiting to be fitted.
This week, Dead Man and I kept a promise to ourselves and tinted some plano lenses to go into some pince-nez glasses. We have a wide range of pince-nez and during our stock count, rediscovered a beautiful box of new old stock pince-nez that had never been glazed, and decided to do something about that!
The name pince-nez is French and roughly translates as ‘pinch the nose’ and that’s exactly what they do! Pince-nez have a long history and were widely used in the Victorian era for close work, distance, or both, yes, they were also glazed up as bifocals. They were worn by both ladies and gentlemen. They were highly fashionable in the late Victorian early Edwardian period, then their popularity gradually waned giving way to the dominance of the spectacles with sides that we all use and love today.
Pince-nez make a stylish and distinctive eyewear choice. There are several characters in popular culture well known for wearing them including Agatha Christie’s intrepid detective Hercule Poirot played impeccably by David Suchet. They lend a dark air of mystery to the wearer, think of Gary’s Oldman deadly but sexy Dracula. Or one of my heart throbs; Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in his black pince-nez and swirling leather coat aiding Neo (Keanu Reeves) – another of my heroes, in kicking Agent Smith’s ass in the post apocalyptic trilogy ‘The Matrix’.
The finished articles with the box with a few more to glaze.
There are different styles of pince-nez and the ones we tinted are called C bridge as they have a C shaped bridge which clips onto your nose. They are foldable and have a small clasp on the left hand side which clips into the joint so you can slip it into a dainty little case easy to fit into your pocket. The loop is for a cord or chain to hold them in place and prevent them from getting lost. The posh ones had extendable chains, we’ve got some of those, of course! We are pleased with our choice of purple and blue non prescription lenses, they are very attractive and make the wearer look rather stylish and are available on our website. We are happy to fit prescription lenses into pince-nez so if you fancy channelling your inner detective or post apocalyptic hero please let us know!
Have a good week
Claire AKA Mrs Deadman