SHADY RAYS SUNGLASSES
Shady Rays is a lifestyle sunglasses brand that does a ton of marketing on social media. If you’ve ever searched for sunglasses, you’ve probably seen an add for Shady Rays pop up in your social feed. As a brand they boast their affordable price, polarized lenses, and no questions asked lost/broken replacement policy. Don’t worry, if you need glasses normally, they offer prescription options as well.
So enough about the company, how are the sunglasses?
Lets start with the good.
I love the lenses. They don’t discolor your vision too much, there is no distortions that I could see (magnification, ect.), and they seemed pretty scratch resistant. After wearing them for a while I often forgot I was even looking through lenses at all. The lenses are polarized as well, and it works very well. The polarization really helps to kill the glare coming off of other vehicles when driving and glare coming off of any shiny object in general.
The other thing that I really like about these shades, and Shady Rays is the replacement policy. Basically, Shady Rays will replace your sunglasses for any reason for a processing fee of $8.89. The only catch is that you can only do this 2 times per original pair of shades. This is a pretty cool policy, and I definitely took advantage of it. I quickly lost my first pair while boating, all I had to do is fill out a form on their website, pay the processing fee, and a new pair was in my mailbox a few days later. Pretty cool. The downside to this that I ended up treating them as disposable. I quickly lost my second pair while at work (maybe stolen) and lost the third pair in a grocery store where my daughter was playing with them. This is completely psychological, but something to keep in mind regardless.
Now for the not so good.
The build quality was kind of all over the place on the 3 different sets that I had. The first pair that I had was by far the best, but even those showed some signs of iffy craftsmanship. The biggest thing for me was the hinges. The first pair I had was a single screw, single hinge design, and out of the box they were really tight and squeaked when opening and closing. Over time the hinges got loose to the point of being floppy, which isn’t ideal either. On the second pair that I got (same model) the hinges were actually different, but had the same problem of getting overly loose over time as the first.
Besides the hinges there were other small things I noticed that made the shades feel a little rough around the edges overall. Where the metal hinge was attached to the arms had excess glue sticking out around the edges, the small sliver inlays at the edge of the frames had small burrs on them, and the arms didn’t sit exactly flush with the frames when open. In addition, the faux wood finish on my timber frames started to wear off after a few months of use in the high wear areas (like where the arms touch the side of my head). These are all things that would probably be covered under the lifetime craftsmanship warranty (this doesn’t count towards your lost/broken replacement number either) but none of the issues were worth it to me as I considered these more of an everyday beater pair anyway.
Conclusions
Shady Rays are a good, low cost option if you are looking for a pair of beater pair of sunglasses. The great lenses and excellent broken/replacement policy make them worth their fairly low price. However if you are expecting these to be Ray Ban killers at less than half the cost, you will probably be disappointed.
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