One month of real-world use. Two pairs. Two failures. One verdict.

I collect glasses the way some people collect watches. Thirty pairs ranging from vintage Persol and custom Mykita to Garrett Leight frames bought in Los Angeles. Frames that last decades, objects you pass down to your children. When the Ray-Ban Meta came out, I thought: why not? I picked up one pair for myself and one for my wife — an €800 bill. We were curious, even excited.

One month later for one pair, six months for the other — both are dead. Broken. Silent. Won’t turn on.

“After-sales service is non-existent in practice, customer follow-up is broken, zero transparency when problems arise — you’re taking a real risk.”

What Meta sells: the future. AI built into your frames. An always-on voice assistant. A discreet camera. Open-ear audio.

What Meta actually delivers: a Bluetooth gadget that randomly disconnects, a battery that can’t make it through a single day, and an after-sales service that vanishes into thin air the moment something goes wrong. Other users report having sent their glasses in for repair, only to receive nothing in return — no confirmation of receipt, no timeline, no response to follow-up messages.

The most common issues

• Repeated Bluetooth disconnections, multiple times a day, for no apparent reason
• Glasses completely dead after battery drain, refusing to restart
• Muffled audio and poor call quality — the person on the other end can’t hear you properly
• EssilorLuxottica after-sales service: warranty refused after just 3 months by some retailers

And then there’s the other problem — the real one: these glasses film your days. Subcontractors in Kenya were tasked with reviewing footage captured by users around the world — intimate images, confidential documents, bank account numbers — all supposedly to train Meta’s AI. A Swedish investigation shed light on this surveillance pipeline. Kenya opened an official inquiry in 2026.

When you wear classic Ray-Bans, you’re making an aesthetic choice — a Cary Grant moment with the Wayfarers. When you wear Ray-Ban Meta, you become a walking sensor in service of a social network that has repeatedly demonstrated it treats personal data as a resource to be mined.

“In 2025, Meta sold 7 million connected Ray-Ban pairs — creating the most intrusive decentralized surveillance network ever built. You are its primary sensor, whether you like it or not.”

Of my thirty pairs of glasses, not one has ever failed me within a month. Not one has ever asked me to create an account just to work. And not one has ever siphoned my private life to servers in Kenya. €800 to become a broken, walking surveillance device.

Next time, I’m sticking with Persol. Oh wait — that’s Luxottica too. What on earth has this world come to, Vuitton and all.

FM