The maker’s own photograph: the blue mirror over the copper lens is the part the name is about.
Most sunglasses brands are frame companies that buy lenses. This one is a lens company that had frames made — and the man on the label runs the lens factory.
TALEX was founded on 1 May 1938 in Tajima, the Osaka neighbourhood its own history calls the birthplace of Japanese spectacle lenses, and its representative director today is Shinzo Tamura, the grandson. The English site says the family made “the first fully balanced polarized sunglasses lens” in 1966; TALEX’s Japanese timeline is more careful — 1966 is when it stopped making ordinary glass lenses to specialise in polarized ones, and the world-first fully balanced spherical polarized lens it claims came in 1970 for glass and 1975 for plastic. Either way, the polarizing filter is the house’s own, made from iodine compounds, and the pitch is that it cuts reflected light without darkening everything else: “noise cancellation for your eyes”.
The Namba is the ultralight frame — a 1950s Wellington, the shape Wayfarers and Frogskins made famous, in double-shot injection-moulded nylon rather than acetate, on the argument that nylon does not whiten or warp with age and sweat. The whole pair weighs 20 grams with lenses; the nose pads are elastomer on flexible titanium arms; 136mm hinge to hinge, 145mm temples. Copper is the driving tint — 30 percent visible light transmission, contrast up, glare down, recommended for winter sports and fishing for the same reason — and the M is a vacuum-deposited blue mirror that takes another five percent or so of the light off in high-glare conditions. Lenses are CR-39, blocking 99 percent of UV; every step of lens manufacture is in-house in Osaka; five-year warranty.
The Gadgeteer, which wore the Copper M for a review in June 2025, found the clarity the real surprise — no fuzziness at the periphery — and the weight the reason they were forgotten on the face indoors. Its one complaint is the honest note here too: 136mm is a medium frame, and a large head wants something wider than the Namba. The other reservations are the ones the spec sheet implies. $230 is real money for nylon, and the listing dates from August 2023, so this is a catalogue item The Awesomer surfaced, not a launch. Six sibling tints in the same frame — Slate, Peridot, Topaz, Carbon, plain Copper and an Onyx HD — run $195 to $275, so the mirror is a $35 premium over the same lens uncoated.