To spend one's life scouring the earth for lost antiquities is a heroic pursuit, regardless of whether you're motivated by the desire to enrich mankind, become famous, or just hit Germans in the face with a whip. Out simply to enrich your dome-steez, Rare Eyewear.

Rare's a ridiculously rad cache of vintage designer specs n' sunglasses from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, which a local dude named Curtis scores all over Europe by low-balling old-timey optometrists who fail to recognize that they're virtually giving away straight awesomeness, because they're old, and European. Reasonably priced stock ranges from long-discontinued, bug eye-ish Diors in several shades of tortoise acetate, to flashy Cazals with skinny temples and turquoise/nickel-plated rims n' bridges, to bulky and squarish Ultra frames in both gloss black and clear/rose plastic blends, evocative of a late-Casino Sam Rothstein, or your Grandparents before they graduated to those Big-Blocky-Glasses-That-Fit-Over-Glasses-And-Make-Them-Look-Like-They're-From-A-Future-Plagued-by-Oldness. Perhaps even saucier are Rare's collection of Carerras (aviator-styled bad boys with painstakingly crafted gold and silver bridge detailing), and refined, Playboy-branded frames from '84, rockin' visible steel-within-clear acetate composition, a bunny decal on the left lens, and a no-longer-socially-acceptable amount of bush.

Curtis usually replaces the frames' original glass with high quality lenses that vary in hue from translucent brown, to mirror gradient, to yellow -- opt for that hue, and be prepared to be told that you chose poorly.

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Hit stores for the bounty and check out the goods at RareEyewear.com