We invite ladies to view CAROLINE ABRAM PARIS 2019-2020 collection.
And yes, you can use your VSP plan to order glasses.
Our sidewalk sandwich board inspired by Caroline Abram and Juan Gris
Other side of sidewalk chalkboard inspired by Caroline Abram and Juan Gris
Caroline’s best wishes to Providence Optical on interview page for ОПТИЧЕСКИЙ Magazine, 2019
These lenses are one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2018 list. Squint Less. See More™
Introducing: Acuvue Oasys® with Transitions™
Acuvue’s new line of light-sensitive, vision-correcting contact lenses (developed in partnership with Transitions Optical), which has been in the works for over a decade, is available now. Contact lens contains a filter that senses the amount of light entering your eye and automatically darkens or lightens to maximize comfort. These lenses are one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2018 list.
ACUVUE® OASYS with Transitions™ quickly and seamlessly adapts to balance the amount of indoor and outdoor light entering the eye, including filtering blue light and blocking harmful UV rays. They begin to darken as soon as they’re exposed to UV or HEV light, with Transitions Light Intelligent Technology enabling the lenses to become dark in 45 seconds – and fade back from dark to clear within 90 seconds when going from outdoors to indoors. At full activation, the lenses block up to 70 percent of visible light.
Long known for our sensational eyeglasses selection, Providence Optical is becoming a destination for contact lens patients too. Our contact lens director Dr. Robert Hill studied with Dr. Marjorie Rah in New England College of Optometry and for 2 years closely worked with Dr. Dennis Karambelas at Vision Care Barrington.
If you were fitted with Acuvue Oasys at your doctor’s offices and wear them currently, stop by at Providence Optical to get free sample in your prescription.
Free samples of Acuvue Oasys with Transitions are available at Providence Optical
If you have passion for eyewear design and speak Italian, this course might change your life.
The 2-year course is a real “eyewear school”, located in Belluno area, Italy. There are 1200 hours of training and 800 hours of internship in leading eyewear companies. You will learn eyewear hand drawing, computer 2D&3D rendering, prototyping, business side of the industry and team working.
As a professional, you will be able to combine fashion and trend aspect with understanding eyeglasses as a medical device.
The applications are accepted until September 20, 2019. Selection of the students will be made on September 24.
For full information please, follow this link:
Faces of Siberian models in the new marketing campaign of Caroline Abram’s eyewear brand
Caroline Abram is a French eyewear designer and founder of the brand “Caroline Abram”. Abram has five international Silmo d’Or awards — 2006, 2008, 2014, 2015 and a nomination in 2017 .
For the past two years, the renowned designer has come to niveous Novosibirsk, a large city in the heart of Siberia (Russia) to photo shoot her new eyewear collection. Caroline explains that she admires the inner strength, subtle beauty and delicacy of Russian women. In two days of shooting, 2,543 photo frames were taken and the models changed their clothes 24 times.
Abram herself directed the models and the photo shoot in general
“Exaggerate, play and provoke”
“Girls! It’s your time to realize the Wonder Woman inside of you.”
We were privileged to chat with Caroline Abram at the Moscow International Optical Fair (MIOF) in February, 2019
Here is a story Caroline told:
“You go to work or to a restaurant. You wear a beautiful coat, shoes and you have a beautiful handbag. Yet, you sit down at your work desk or at a restaurant table. You put your coat and a purse away and no-one sees your feet :(. What’s left? Your glasses. They tell everything about you. Who you are, what mood you have, what attitude. That’s why, I think, a desire to get new glasses should come first. I want to convince all women that they look amazing in glasses. For me, eyewear is makeup. We play with makeup to change our looks by changing lipstick, blush and eyeshadow colors. With makeup, we convey our mood; sometimes matching clothes, sometimes contrasting, blending or accenting…A woman should wear eyewear according to her mood.
I also believe that eyewear should empower women, although I don’t consider myself a feminist, I believe in women’s strength and confidence and eyewear is just the right tool to show that. ”
Caroline Abram and Onega Astaltsova in Moscow, February, 2019
Caroline Abram collection will be available at Providence Optical in May 2019.
Illustration Gilles Boogaerts
In April 2008 MADAME FIGARO published small questionnaire regarding the colors of his “inner universe”. We post it the way it was published, in French.
De quelle couleur êtes-vous?
Noir et blanc.
La couleur qui vous fait voir la vie en rose?
Certainement pas une piece peinte en rose vif. Le blanc bleuté, le gris perle très pâle et le rose très, très pâle.
Avec quelle couleur êtes-vous fâché?
Le rouge et le bleu vif pour vivre. Et le mauve et le violet, les pires couleurs en décoration.
Qu’est-ce qui rime avec couleur?
Couleur=bonheur.
Couleur=malheur…qu’on attribue bêtement à certaines couleurs, comme vert, que j’adore.
Design firm ANTI Hamar has created a typeface based on the traditional eye chart. It’s called OPTICIAN SANS
This uncompleted alphabet has been seen by millions when testing their visual acuity by an eye doctor. Optician Kay Louise Sloane created these letters in 1959 as a successor to the Snellen chart, produced a hundred years before that since then they’ve been limited to these 10 letters. Up until now. “We based the typeface on the same 5×5 grid as the original optotype letters and completed the full alphabet including numbers and special characters,” – say creators of ANTI Hamar firm (Norway). It’s called OPTICIAN SANS. The effort began as a rebranding for the optical shop in Norway that wanted to deliver the messages to its customers as clear as possible.
Snellen chart was developed in 1862 to measure visual acuity. Sloan chart was developed in 1952, with the same proportions, but without serifs. Optician Sans was developed in 2018 as fully functional facetype (originally for branding for the optical store in Norway).
Not a bad idea. You can also try this typeface for your business. Maybe it’s the best font for advertising 🙂 The new font is free at
That’s how our name in Optician Sans looks like:
Snellen chart at a doctor office at South Dakota original 1880 Town
Non-prescription sunglasses sale until August 31’2018
Eyewear designer Lucas de Staël and Onega Astaltsova at his workshop in Paris, July 2018
We recently visited award-winning eyewear designer Lucas de Staël’s very first eyewear boutique, which he opened in the Marais district of Paris in January of this year, and we just had to share the experience with you! In collaboration with architect Nicolas Omet, de Staël created a space in the where oak, steel and leather – Staël’s trademark frame material — play off each other and interact with the eyewear on display.
The modular wall on the right features 900 magnets – evoking the design of de Staël’s famous “Le Trinocle” accessory that uses a magnet to allow for different combinations of a binocle, a mirror and a magnifying glass. Arrayed in an industrial monochrome pattern, the magnets allow for an infinite variety of arrangements of the metal shelves that showcase some of the eyewear.
In other portions of the shop, eyeglasses are suspended on netting affixed to a brick wall and seem to be suspended in mid-air (thanks to invisible plastic holders) against a backlit white wall. A plant conservatory adds a natural aura of soft beauty and relaxation to the experience.
Pendant lamps with cow-leather shades, made in de Staël’s workshop, provide soft, focused illumination and are available for sale. Likewise, his sleek oak and steel storage drawer cabinets and “schoolboy chairs” are available for purchase.
Providence Optical has proudly carried de Staël’s Undostrial and LDS lines since their inception. Come try on some of this century’s finest innovation in eyewear!
Modular wall at Lucas de Staël store, Paris
Leather frame Minotaure 1900 was inspired by Art Nouveau.
General view of the store with tropical plants in the background
Leather light pendants at Lucas de Staël store, Marais, Paris. Leather — cow and goat — is a one of de Staël’s characteristic frame materials. He also uses snake, stingray and iguana skins for special projects.
Blackfin logo- cookies
Situated in the Agordo, Italy, nestled in the Dolomite Mountains and surrounded by fragrant forests, the Blackfin facility continues the legacy established by CEO Nicola Del Din’s mother, when she founded Pramaor eyewear in 1971. Our colleague from OpticMagazine (Russia) had the opportunity to sit down with Del Din at MIDO international eyewear show in Milan a couple of months ago to ask him about his vision for the company and what he’s proudest of.
Chris wears ARC by Blackfin. Model ARC received special prize at SILMO (Paris) in 2017
The company was started in 1971 by the current CEO’s mother and he believes that with the service of the internet they are just where they need to be right now, offering both exceptional customer service and advanced technology with their product. His father sadly passed away in 1998, he took over the company and was forced to change strategy. In 2008 he decided to go with a fresh approach – they now have 47 years production and experience of technology under their belt, which has given them a new approach, new ideas and a completely different mentality. However, they will always continue to be Italian in their design, way of life and production.
In 2012, Del Din made the decision to work solely in titanium and beta-titanium (an alloy created for extraordinary flexibility) which gives their frames a stylish edge as well as being extremely lightweight and durable. Titanium is in fact one of the purest metals available in the industry. It is strong, light-weight (40% less than steel), non-allergenic, durable, biocompatible and non-toxic – all in keeping with the pristine natural surroundings of the Blackfin facility.
Meticulous craftsmanship also is part of the formula. Creating a Blackfin frame requires 53 steps, which Del Din refers to not as “processes” but rather as “rites of passage”. That says it all. “Blackfin is a brand that has always invested in research and innovation, our goal being to offer a product of absolute excellence”, said Del Din while receiving prize for Technological Innovation at Silmo (Paris) in 2015. Innovation is a special way to hold lenses in a frame, called Shark-lock. Up until 2010 Blackfin were producing for bigger companies, but the margin was minimal so they had to rethink their process. As usual it wasn’t an easy change but they eventually found their way on a new and exciting road. Their marketing strategy a year ago was “the sky is the limit”, for some limits can be a problem, but Blackfin certainly exceeded those. The brand is all about looking beyond and they are always looking to update their products, as well as continuing to learn. This is why they believe in being different, because they were once alone in this field and wanted to make a change, which was difficult but also achievable.
Blackfin now has a number of distributors in Europe, USA, Canada, Russia, Mexico and Asia and they wont be stopping there. Drop by Providence Optical to see for yourself what makes these frames so standout, with our new range hand picked by our opticians specially for you.
Blackfin ARGYLE
Self-Animating Images: The pictures appear to creep because of the arrangement of colors in the small small repeated patterns. Combination of 4 colors gives the best illusion. These 4 colors should be as different from each other as is possible
Our natural feeling is that our minds are like a mirror on which light falls – that we simply perceive the world as it is. For a long time, philosophers and scientists thought along similar lines. In the late eighteenth century Immanuel Kant introduced the idea that there is a stage between what our eyes and ears pick up and what we perceive; that while we depend on sensory data for our knowledge, we make sense of its profusion and confusion by relying on in-built mental categories. But it took scientists science some time scientists to catch up with Kant; in classical physiology up until the twentieth century, visual images fell upon the optic nerve, and that was that. Freud suspected that the function of receiving sensory signals and registering them were separate, though he had no strong evidence for it at the time. We now know that the brain does indeed do a lot of work to make reality comprehensible- that the world as scanned by our eyes is rather different from the world we see. Your brain “serves up a story to you”. In a sense, deception begins the moment you open your eyes. (Ian Leslie “BORN LIARS”)
A dizzying spiral pattern vividly activates Francis Stark‘s Chorus Girl works, generating the illusion of their mobility. (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2017) The pattern based on well-known work Rotating Snake by Akiyoshi Kitaoka.
If you stare at a fixed point in space, like a dot on the wall in front of you, everything to the left of the do is projected to the right half of your brain, and vice versa. each hemisphere receives nerve transmissions from the opposite leg and arm and picks up sound from the opposite ear. Nobody knows why, they just do.
Slender works by Venezuelan-American artist Rafael Barrios play like a 3D optical illusion (New York, 2012)
Your eyes don’t have enough neuronal receptors to capture a whole property, so pupils dance frantically around as they try to bring the sharper region of focus to bear every part of the room, a movement known as the saccade. Yet you have the illusion of continuous, coherent vision.
3D illusion crosswalk in Ísafjörður ( Iceland ) helps slow down speeding motorists
Also in Beijing (China)
And in Ahmedabad ( India )
The brain ‘actively creates pictures of the world’. Rather than trying to interpret every new thing it sees as if encountering it for the first time, the brain makes series of working assumptions about what a chair looks like, or a person, and where object going to be, then makes predictions about- best guesses- about what’s before us. It compares its expectations with the new information coming in, checks for mistakes, and revises accordingly. The result is ‘a fantasy that collides with reality’.
The same paint (nail lacquer Essie 66 in this case) looks darker on white background then on a finger.