Masunaga 9001 Aviator Sunglasses

Who doesn’t love a good aviator?  Throughout the history of sunglasses the aviator shape is one of the most iconic.  Its popularity be can be traced back to General Douglas MacArthur.  He looked quite sharp in them.  Moss Lipow writing for TheEyewearBlog.com has researched the history of aviators and found that the other reason they were so popular after World War II is that not much else was available to consumers in the years that followed. 

The Masunaga 9001 is one of my favorites from my personal collection.  I personally own the black and silver with the gradient grey lenses, but in this picture I am wearing the new black color with glass polarized grey lenses.

I love these glass lenses.  Most wearers realize that glass is nice because it is harder to scratch, but there are many other great benefits of glass as well.  Glass has the highest Abbe value of all the lens materials.  The higher the Abbe value the lower the amount of chromatic aberration.  Those are just fancy words that mean when light passes through a glass lens it will not bend as much along its different wavelengths.  Less bending is good because that means clarity will be sharper throughout the lens.

Masunaga makes amazingly beautiful pieces of eyewear.  The Japanese titanium is handcrafted and on the eyewires of the 9001 you will read the name of the founder Gozaemon Masunaga repeated over and over in font so tiny that you practically need a magnifying lens to read it.  The detailing is incredible.

The comfort of the fit is incredible too.  If you like wearing frames that you hardly feel on your nose and ears then this is the frame for you.