Ic!Berlin Eyewear

ic! berlin designs and produces screwless glasses and sunglasses in its own Produktion Haus in the heart of Berlin. 100% Made in Germany. ic! berlin is a child of the new Berlin entrepreneurial revolution, a thriving creative metropolis fuelling innovation and ideas. ic! berlin produces glasses, sunglasses, reading glasses and sports glasses for kids, women, men, and everyone in between. Each and every ic! berlin frame features a one-of-a-kind patented screwless hinge system, which combined with high quality materials such as sprung stainless steel, makes ic! berlin eyewear virtually indestructible. ic! berlin eyewear is designed with passion, produced with technical precision and handcrafted with love.

Colourful, vibrant, shimmering…Just like a rainbow. Nearly too good to be true; just like their frames. This time, they have coated them: no varnish. They shine in exciting colours created through simple light refraction.

Thanks to their electric PVD coating the stainless steel now sparkles in brilliant colours. It’s not a paint-job: they vacuum deposit an extra thin layer of crystals directly into the surface of the metal that reflects light in certain wavelengths. Like a rainbow. Just as beautiful, only permanent! The layer is ten times thinner than a human hair and doesn’t tarnish or scratch, making the world-famous ic! berlin hinge even smoother and more resistant to wear.

Eyewear models shine in 17 different PVD coated colors, such as: electric violet, electric light blue, electric turquoise and electric magenta.

electric! PVD coating from ic! berlin on Vimeo.

Technical background:

Below is five questions to Thomas Bochmann, technical director / ic! berlin Production and Innovation department about the new PVD coating.

What is PVD coating?
PVD stands for Physical Vapor Deposition and is a vacuum-based coating process, used specifically in the manufacturing of heavy machinery as well as for parts exposed to heavy wear such as drills and milling cutters.

Why use PVD coating for glasses?
PVD coating is perfect for our frames, since the patented ic! berlin hinge has bigger contact and sliding surfaces than common hinges with screws. The hard and friction- reducing PVD coating can be applied in a perfectly even coating of only a thousandth of millimeter thin and makes the hinge therefore easy to manipulate as well as wear resistant.

What’s the innovation about?
From the technical point of view, it wasn’t possible, until now, to coat stainless steel in such a way as to obtain really vibrant colours. In collaboration with one of our suppliers, the ic! berlin electric! innovation department has developed this new coating technique that enables metal coating in nearly all the colors of the known spectrum, just like a rainbow.

How are those new colors created?
In the same way a prism breaks the light in individual light waves and thus reflecting the different colours of the rainbow, the smallest crystal parts refract and reflect the light – depending on the nanometric layer construction– in one specific wave length.

What was the biggest challenge?
The development of PVD colour coating was a complex process, because the crystal layers have to be applied perfectly evenly over the whole surface, otherwise the reflecting light waves change specific colour tones and those colour tones could be partially perceived differently as originally intended.