In partnership with Pair Eyewear
Glasses bought online ask you to make three decisions at once. You pick a frame you have never held, a lens package described in jargon, and a size based on numbers stamped inside a temple arm. Pair Eyewear removes some of that friction with a build-it-yourself system, and its new Forte Collection gives the process a starting point that looks less like a value purchase and more like something from an optical shop.
Forte arrives August 19, 2026 as Pair’s first collection built around frame construction rather than pattern. Five silhouettes, sculpted acetate, polished metal accents, and a hinge spec Pair has not used before. The guide below walks through what the collection includes, how to pick the right frame from it, what the final number at checkout comes to, and who the collection suits.
Table of Contents
Get to Know Pair Eyewear
A quick orientation helps before the frames, because Forte sits inside a system rather than standing alone.
Pair Eyewear launched in 2017 out of Stanford, started by Sophia Edelstein and Nathan Kondamuri, and now runs out of New York. Its idea was simple. Buy one good Base Frame, then change how it looks with magnetic Top Frames that snap over the front. The brand has sold more than three million Top Frames across the US and Canada, and its catalog of snap-on designs runs past a thousand, including licensed lines from Disney, Marvel, Harry Potter, the NBA, and the Van Gogh Museum.
The core range starts at $80 in the US and $95 in Canada, prescription included. Forte sits above that at $110 USD and $155 CAD, and the gap is the point of the collection. Where the core frames are built for swapping, Forte is built to look finished on its own.
What the Pair Eyewear Forte Collection Includes
Five frames launched together, and they share a build rather than a theme.
All five Forte frames are cut from hand-polished sculpted acetate with polished metal accents at the temples and hinges. All five use five-barrel anti-wear hinges, a heavier spec than the three-barrel hinges common at this price, and the part of a frame most likely to loosen after a year of daily folding. Colorways run to five per frame, drawn from a shared palette of Amber Tortoise with Gold, Black with Gold, Crystal Clear with Gold, and Vintage Brown Tortoise with Gold, with a fifth shade specific to each silhouette.
All five stay fully Top Frame compatible, so nothing about the upgrade cuts you off from the snap-on catalog. What changes is that these frames no longer need one.
The Flora
A wide butterfly cat-eye with a lifted outer corner, shown in Amber Tortoise with Gold. The upsweep sits high enough to read as deliberate without tipping into costume, and the width suits faces that find standard cat-eyes pinch at the temples.
Highlights
- Wide butterfly cat-eye silhouette
- Hero colorway Amber Tortoise with Gold
- Frame width 140.1mm, lens 52mm, bridge 18mm, temple 140mm
- Lens height 41.7mm
- Suits oval, round, and heart faces
The Daley
A wide round frame in Red Tortoise with Gold, and the most openly vintage of the launch lineup. Round frames tend to run small, so a 143mm width paired with a 20mm bridge gives the silhouette room to sit properly on a broader face instead of clustering in the middle of it.
Highlights
- Wide round silhouette with a 20mm bridge, the widest in the collection
- Hero colorway Red Tortoise with Gold
- Frame width 143mm, lens 51mm, temple 140mm
- Lens height 44.8mm
- Suits square, oblong, and diamond faces
The Evelyn
A wide oversized square in Vintage Brown Tortoise with Gold, and the largest aperture in the collection at 47.2mm of lens height. Oversized squares carry a lot of visual weight, which works in your favor if you want the frame to be the accessory rather than a support act for a Top Frame.
Highlights
- Wide oversized square silhouette
- Hero colorway Vintage Brown Tortoise with Gold
- Frame width 143mm, lens 53mm, bridge 17mm, temple 140mm
- Tallest lens in the collection at 47.2mm
- Suits round, oval, and heart faces
The Iverson
A wide square in Dark Green Horn with Silver, the only Forte frame to pair with silver hardware rather than gold. Dark green horn photographs close to black at a conversational distance and warms up in daylight, which makes it the most office-neutral option in the launch lineup.
Highlights
- Wide square silhouette with a 145mm temple, the longest in the collection
- Hero colorway Dark Green Horn with Silver
- Frame width 142mm, lens 52mm, bridge 19mm
- Lens height 41.3mm
- Silver metal accents rather than gold
The Leigh
A medium round in Crystal Clear with Gold, and the smallest frame at launch. Crystal against gold hardware gives you the outline of a frame without the block of color, which suits anyone who wants the silhouette to register without the frame announcing itself first.
Highlights
- Medium round silhouette, the most compact frame in the collection
- Hero colorway Crystal Clear with Gold
- Clear acetate lets the metal accents carry the detail
- Also offered in the shared Forte palette including Dark Green Horn with Silver
- Suits square, oblong, and heart faces
How to Pick the Right Forte Frame
Five options sounds manageable until all five look good on the product page. Four questions narrow it fast, in the order that counts.
Start with width, not style
The single most common online glasses mistake is picking a silhouette you like and discovering it sits wrong. Frame width has to match face width, because a frame too narrow pinches at the temples and leaves marks, while one too wide slides down the nose however you adjust the pads. Measure your current pair’s total width, the number printed inside the temple or measured hinge to hinge, and compare it against Forte’s range. Four of the five sit between 140mm and 143mm, so the collection skews wide. The Leigh is the pick for narrower faces.
Then choose the silhouette against your face
Angular faces tend to soften with round or oval frames, and rounder faces gain definition from square or upswept ones. Daley and Leigh are the round options, Evelyn and Iverson the squares, and Flora the cat-eye. Pair’s virtual try-on lets you test all five before committing, which is worth the two minutes given how differently a 51mm round and a 53mm oversized square land on the same face.
Decide whether Top Frames are part of the plan
Forte works either way, and your answer changes which colorway to choose. Anyone planning to swap Top Frames regularly is better served by a neutral base, since Black with Gold or Crystal Clear with Gold sit under a patterned snap-on without competing with it. Anyone buying Forte to wear as-is can go the other direction and take the shade that carries the frame, whether that is Red Tortoise, Amber Tortoise, or Dark Green Horn.
Pick the colorway for your wardrobe, not the trend
Gold hardware warms a frame and reads softer, silver cools it and reads sharper. Tortoise carries warmth and pairs with browns, creams, and olive. Crystal disappears against most palettes, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on what you want the frame to do. Iverson in Dark Green Horn with Silver is the most conservative combination in the collection, and Daley in Red Tortoise the most expressive.
What a Forte Pair Costs at Checkout
The frame price is the start of the number, not the end of it, and lens choices move it more than most buyers expect.
Forte frames list at $110 USD and $155 CAD, dropping to $93.50 USD and $131.75 CAD with a Pair+ membership, which runs $30 a month and returns that amount as store credit plus 15% off every order. Readers between +0.50 and +2.75 and non-prescription lenses add nothing to the frame price. Beyond that, the add-ons stack.
Lens costs to plan for:
- Single vision lenses add $19
- Progressives start at $199, with the Premier tier adding $50 on top
- OfficeOptics anti-fatigue lenses add $89
- Blue-light filtering adds $49
- Light-responsive SolarSense lenses add $149
- Advanced anti-reflective coating adds $25
- Plus lens material adds $39, and Premium 1.67 high-index adds $59
A single-vision Forte pair with anti-reflective coating lands near $154 before tax. The same frame in progressives with a high-index material runs past $370. Neither number is hidden, but the difference is large enough that it belongs in your decision rather than at your checkout.
Two things pull the total back down. Pair lists Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, EyeMed, Humana, Spectera, VSP, and UnitedHealthcare among providers customers claim through, framed as an average saving of around $100 through out-of-network reimbursement rather than direct billing. FSA and HSA funds also apply to prescription glasses and eligible accessories, which effectively pays for the frame in pre-tax dollars.
What Customers Say About Pair Frames
Forte launched in August 2026, so the collection has not been in circulation long enough to build a review record of its own. What exists instead is the feedback on the base frames Pair has sold for years, and it is more useful than it sounds, because Forte is cut in the same acetate, finished in the same lab, and sold under the same return terms.
The volume alone is unusual for the category. Pair’s three best-selling base frames hold 4.8, 4.8, and 4.7 out of 5, drawn from more than 13,500, 10,700, and 4,400 reviews respectively, and the tags surfacing most often across them are comfort, appearance, and build quality in that order. Fit is the theme buyers return to hardest, helped by the fact that Pair publishes full measurements on every product page rather than a vague small, medium, and large.
One reviewer put the result plainly on the brand’s Murphy page: “I can’t believe these fit so perfectly. Their descriptions are great.” Longevity comes up nearly as often, with a Kirby buyer writing that she has “had my first pair for over three years and loved it still have them.”
Where that record becomes relevant to Forte is in what the new collection inherits. The acetate, the lens lab, the published measurements, and the 30-day return window all carry over unchanged. What does not carry over is the hardware, since Forte is the first Pair collection built on five-barrel anti-wear hinges rather than the lighter spec used across the core range. So the one question the existing reviews cannot answer is how the new hinges hold up over a year of daily folding, and that answer arrives around the turn of the year.
Delivery, Returns, and Warranty
An unseen frame is only a safe purchase if you can send it back easily, so the terms deserve a read before the checkout button.
Pair ships free on all US and Canadian orders, with expedited tiers available at extra cost. Returns run on a 30-day window that covers prescription lenses, which is less common than it sounds, since many online optical retailers treat cut prescription lenses as final sale. PairCare adds a year of coverage against broken frames and scratched lenses, with replacements sent free.
Polycarbonate lenses cover SPH values from -9.00 to +6.00 and CYL values from -4.00 to +4.00. Prescriptions outside that range need confirmation with the brand before ordering, since they fall outside the standard lens build.
Is the Forte Collection Worth It?
The last question is whether the step up from Pair’s core range earns the extra $30.
Forte makes sense for a specific buyer. Anyone who liked the idea of Pair but found the core frames read a little casual for their setting now has a version that does not. Sculpted acetate, metal accents, and five-barrel hinges are the details that separate a frame you tolerate from one you notice, and at $110 they arrive well below what comparable acetate costs at an optical counter. The collection also skews wide, which solves a problem for anyone whose face has been poorly served by standard sizing.
The case against is equally clear. Anyone whose main interest in Pair is the Top Frame catalog is paying for construction that spends most of its life hidden under a snap-on, and the $80 core frames do that job for less. Buyers who need progressives should also run the full number before falling for a colorway, because the lens package will outweigh the frame.
For everyone else, Forte is the version of Pair worth buying first. Start with the width, pick the silhouette against your face, choose a colorway based on whether Top Frames are part of your plan, and price the lenses before you commit.
Forte Collection FAQs
A few questions come up often enough to answer directly.
Are Forte frames compatible with Top Frames?
Yes. All five work with Pair’s full Top Frame catalog, so nothing about the upgrade limits the snap-on range.
How much do Forte frames cost?
$110 USD and $155 CAD for the frame, or $93.50 USD and $131.75 CAD with a Pair+ membership. Lens add-ons are separate.
Can I get Forte frames in progressives?
Yes. Progressive lenses are offered across the collection, starting at $199 on top of the frame price.
What is the return window?
30 days, and it covers prescription lenses rather than treating them as final sale.
Which Forte frame is the widest?
Daley and Evelyn both measure 143mm, with Iverson at 142mm and Flora at 140.1mm. Leigh is the medium-width option.
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