Materials.

CADORE. Acetate, cut and coloured by hand.

High in the Dolomites, a small team spends days turning raw cotton into something you’ll wear on your face for years. It’s slower than it needs to be, on purpose. Here’s what that actually looks like.

STEP 1. Creating the acetate blocks
Cotton and wood pulp, treated and pressed into blocks: that’s where a Binôche frame begins.
STEP 2 & 3. Coloring & cutting
The colour of our frames isn’t painted on afterwards; it grows through the material itself, layer by layer, the way rings sit inside a tree trunk. We let the sheets rest for weeks before we dare to cut them, and when we do, we cut generously: 8mm thick, twice the industry standard. 

For our multi-coloured frames, we take it a step further. Every colour is cut into its own strip, then placed by hand into the pattern you’ll eventually wear. No two frames leave the workshop exactly alike, and we like it that way.

STEP 4. Tumbling In tumbling barrels filled with wood chips and polishing wax, the cut frames spend several days finding their shape, rough edges softening a little more with every turn.

STEP 5 & 6. Assemblage and hand polishing
Then comes the part no machine can do: every frame is assembled by hand, front and temples brought together, and the inscription engraved into the acetate. 

Finally the frame is polished until it holds a glass-like shine. It’s this stage, more than any other, that gives a binôche frame the weight you feel the moment you pick one up.

BELLUNO. Stainless steel, laser-cut into shape.

High in the gateway to the Dolomites, our metal frames start as a single sheet of stainless steel, laser-cutted with a level of precision that keeps the metal from warping and leaves the edge clean from the very first pass.

Colour comes next: sprayed first, then finished by hand, with the finest lines painted one at a time. For bicolour frames, the entire process happens twice, coat by coat, until both colours sit exactly where they should. A final protective layer locks it all in. Where an average metal frame fades within two years, ours doesn’t.