About

Sunglasses have rested on the nose for two hundred years. AirFly doesn't.

01 · The idea

Why we took the nosepads off

Every problem people have with sports eyewear starts at the same place. Sweat builds up on the bridge of the nose and the frame slides down. Two small pads carry the entire weight, so after three hours there are two red marks. A helmet strap, a swim cap or a hat pushes the frame forward and the fit is gone.

AirFly removes the nosepads entirely. Two adjustable side pads rest on the cheekbones instead, and the temple tips hold at the back of the head — four points of contact rather than three, none of them on skin that sweats. Nothing touches the nose at all.

It also means fit no longer depends on the shape of your nose or the width of your bridge. The same frame works on faces that conventional eyewear has never fitted properly.

A runner wearing AirFly nosepad-free sunglasses, with airflow streamlines passing through the frame
Nothing on the bridge of the nose. The frame is held on the cheekbones and behind the ears, and air keeps moving through the space where a nosepad would sit.

02 · The patent

An invention, protected internationally

Removing the nosepads is easy to say and hard to do. The load has to go somewhere, and putting it on the cheekbones only works if the pads can be moved — rotated, shifted and angled — to follow a face that no two people share. That mechanism is the invention, and it is the reason no one else sells eyewear that fits this way.

The side-pad structure is registered as a patent across major markets worldwide, including Japan, the United States, China, South Korea and Hong Kong. When you see a frame described as "nosepad-free", this is the design it is describing.

AirFly patent certificates for the nosepad-free side pad structure from Japan, the United States, China, Hong Kong and South Korea
Patent certificates for the side-pad structure, filed by ZYGOSPEC under the title Eyeglass frame without nosepad and its method of wearing.

03 · The maker

Made in Sabae, the eyewear capital of Japan

AirFly is designed and built by ZYGOSPEC in Sabae. If you wear Japanese glasses, they almost certainly came from this one small city in Fukui prefecture: Sabae has been making frames since 1905 and today produces the overwhelming majority of all eyewear manufactured in Japan. It is also where the world's first titanium spectacle frame was made, in 1981 — the technique the rest of the industry then had to learn.

An AirFly frame being set into its mould at the ZYGOSPEC workshop in Sabae, Fukui, Japan Close-up of the AirFly injection mould cavity showing the frame and side pad geometry
A frame being set into its mould in Sabae, and the cavity that forms it. Every shape needs tooling cut for it alone.

What a town like that gives you is not scale. It is the opposite: a hundred years of workshops that will still cut a new mould for an idea nobody has tried. AirFly's side pads have to be bent, shifted and angled by the person wearing them, and an adjustable part is a much harder part to make than a fixed one. Most manufacturers simply avoid it.

Made in
Sabae, Fukui — Japan
Patent
Registered internationally
Lens
Polycarbonate, 99%+ UV

04 · Honestly

It takes a week or two

We'd rather say this before you buy than after. A frame that doesn't sit on your nose feels wrong at first — most people notice it for the first week or two, the way you notice a new watch. Then you stop noticing, and going back to a conventional pair feels like the strange one.

The side pads are meant to be adjusted, and the first adjustment is rarely the final one. The fit and sizing guide covers how to shape them, what to do if the lens sits too high, and how to tighten the hold for running.

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