Scratched Sunglasses: What Can and Cannot Be Fixed

Start with the fact that changes what you should do: a scratch is missing material. Nothing puts it back. Every “scratch removal” method — toothpaste, baking soda, car polish, wax, a buffing wheel — works by abrading the lens surface around the scratch until the scratch is shallower relative to it. On a modern sunglass lens that surface is where the anti-reflective, mirror and hard coatings live, so the trade you are making is one visible line in exchange for a hazier lens with less coating on it. That is a bad trade in nearly every case.

So the question worth asking is not “how do I fix it?” but “does this scratch actually matter?”— and here there is a clear answer from an issuing authority. An American Academy of Ophthalmology ophthalmologist’s answer on scratched lenses states that light scratches will not change the prescription or the protective features of the lens, although they can be annoying if they sit near your visual axis, while extensive scratches or loss of coatings can impair your clarity of vision and possibly decrease protection from UV light. That one sentence pair is the whole decision tree. Light: leave it. Extensive: replace it.

First, check it is actually a scratch

More “scratched” lenses than you would expect are dirty ones, or ones with a coating that has smeared rather than lifted. Rinse the lens under lukewarm running water to float the grit off, add a drop of plain dish soap, rub gently with your fingertips, rinse again and dry with a clean microfiber cloth. If the marks are gone, they were residue.

That same routine is also the main way scratches get prevented, because the single most common cause of lens scratching is dry-wiping a lens that has grit on it — a shirt tail, a paper napkin, the corner of a towel. The AAO answer we cite makes a related point: lens wipes themselves can cause damage if they are low quality, misused, or used when sand or grit is sitting on the wipe or the lens. Our guide to cleaning sunglasses has the full routine and the five things not to do.

Light or extensive? How to tell

Hold the lens at arm’s length against a plain, bright background — a wall or an overcast sky — and look through it rather than at it. Then rotate it slowly.

Light. You can see the marks when you tilt the lens to catch the light, but looking through it the view is clean. A handful of fine lines, none deep enough to catch a fingernail. Per the AAO, nothing is compromised. If it sits right in your line of sight it may still irritate you, and that is a legitimate reason to replace a lens — just not a safety one.

Extensive. Looking through the lens the view is hazy, or there is a visible bloom of scattered light around bright objects. You can catch a fingernail in a gouge. There are cloudy patches, or fine crazing across the whole surface, or areas where a mirror or anti-reflective coating has visibly flaked. This is the category where the AAO says clarity and UV protection can both be affected, and it is the point to stop relying on the pair for sun protection.

There is a specific reason not to keep wearing badly scratched dark lenses, beyond the haze. Pupil size responds to visible light, so a dark lens opens your pupils up. If that lens’s UV performance has degraded, the ultraviolet still gets through a wider aperture — the one genuinely risky combination in eyewear, and the subject of are cheap sunglasses bad for your eyes. The FDA’s point applies here too: you cannot judge a lens’s UV performance by looking at it, which is exactly why an unknowable scratched lens should be retired rather than assessed by eye.

What to do with an extensively scratched pair

Check the warranty, but do not expect much.Lens scratches are excluded almost universally. Persol’s own FAQ states that Luxottica guarantees its sunglasses against material and manufacturing defects for two years from delivery but excludes scratches on sun lenses, along with damage from accident, abuse, neglect, shock, improper use, unauthorised repair and normal wear and tear. OTIS excludes scratched or cracked lenses from its lifetime warranty. Treat lens scratching as a consumable cost.

Ask about a replacement lens, model by model. Some brands supply replacement lenses for some frames, and if the frame itself is good — a well-finished acetate front with metal hinges — re-lensing can be worth it. Our guide to replacing sunglass lenses covers when the economics work, and the one thing a third-party lens cannot give you back: a certified filter category and UV figure for the lens you are fitting.

On a cheap frame, replace the pair. If the sunglasses cost $30, a replacement lens service will cost more than a new pair and will not come with the stated UV figure the original listing carried. This is not a cynical answer: it is the honest arithmetic, and it is one of the arguments for owning an inexpensive everyday pair, made in best everyday sunglasses.

The lens decides this, not the frame

Scratch resistance is a property of the lens material, and the spread is wide. Mineral glass is the hardest option by a long way and is the reason a glass-lensed pair can be clear after a decade; its trade-off is weight and the fact that it can chip from a hard impact. Polycarbonate is the most impact-resistant and among the softest, so it survives being dropped and hazes with time. CR-39 sits between them. Our pages on sunglasses lens materials and best glass lens sunglasses cover the full comparison, and do sunglasses expire covers the related question of when a pair is simply finished.

The frame material is not irrelevant, just irrelevant to this. Where acetate helps is everything around the lens: a frame an optician can re-set means a pair stays comfortable enough to keep in a case rather than shoved in a pocket, and a metal hinge set into acetate means a loose screw is a repair rather than a write-off. See can acetate frames be repaired and acetate frame care.