Meta’s $299 Smart Glasses Drop Ray-Ban, Add Kylie Jenner

Meta on Tuesday unveiled its first smart glasses designed in-house, the simply named Meta Glasses, starting at $299 and arriving in three styles including a $399 collaboration with Kylie Jenner called Starfire. The launch ends Meta’s three-year habit of putting a co-branded Ray-Ban logo on every pair it sells, even as EssilorLuxottica continues to manufacture the new line and stamp its name on the inside of each temple.

The move is a calculated bet. Meta is reaching for volume at a price point $80 below its second-generation Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer, leaning on a reality TV star to carry the new design language, and tying the launch to Muse Spark, the first AI model from its new Superintelligence Labs. It all lands while WIRED and The New York Times have, in recent months, put facial recognition back on the table as the next big question for Meta’s hardware.

Meta Goes Solo, With $80 Off the Ray-Ban

Meta Glasses begin at $299, a figure Meta is putting in direct contrast to the $379 starting price of its Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 line. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, framed the gap in plain terms at a New York press event on Monday: reaching more buyers is not just about design and style, it is also about the price point that a brand can reach. Consumers pay a premium for a Wayfarer, Bosworth said, and Meta now wants a pair that does not ask for that premium.

The glasses come in three styles: a slim rectangular frame called Adventurer, a thicker squarer one called Fury, and a slim oval Kylie Jenner collaboration. All three ship in multiple colors and support prescription lenses. They also feature the same adjustable nose pads Meta introduced earlier in the year on its prescription-optimized Optics Styles, with three click-in positions designed to sit more comfortably on a wider range of face shapes.

Meta continues to partner with EssilorLuxottica, the Italian-French eyewear giant that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley, on the manufacturing and design of the new line. The EssilorLuxottica logo appears alongside Meta’s on the inside of the temple arms and on the packaging, even though the outside carries no Ray-Ban branding at all. The Ray-Ban and Oakley co-branded lines stay on sale unchanged, including the the Neural Band handwriting update on the $799 Ray-Ban Display released earlier in 2026.

The Three Frames, Side by Side

Meta is selling the line as a single product family with three looks. Internals are essentially the same across the three; what changes is the frame, the fit, and the price tag on the celebrity edition.

Every frame supports prescription lenses and ships with the same camera and audio stack used in Meta’s existing display-less smart glasses. The Adventurer and Fury are designed to look like ordinary eyewear; the Kylie Starfire leans into a thinner, more fashion-forward silhouette that Meta executives described as meant to be worn slightly down the bridge of the nose.

Why Drop the Ray-Ban Label

Reaching people isn’t just about design and style. It’s also about the price point that you can reach, and so if you’re going to be wearing the Ray-Ban Wayfarer, you pay a premium for that.

Bosworth used Monday’s event to draw a line between the two tiers. Consumers will keep paying for the Ray-Ban badge, he said, and Meta is “absolutely thrilled” to keep selling Ray-Ban Metas. The new in-house frames are meant to expand, not replace, the lineup. With the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display sitting at the top of the stack and the Oakley Meta Vanguard at $499 for athletes, the $299 entry point is a way to bring in first-time buyers who have not yet been willing to pay for a designer label.

Alex Himel, Meta’s vice president of wearables, told Bloomberg the new approach responds to demand for a more accessible price point. Meta and EssilorLuxottica considered other EssilorLuxottica-owned brands for the lower tier and found none with strong name recognition. The result is the first Meta-branded pair to ship in volume without a designer co-brand in front. Himel’s own description of the trade, in the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display launched in September 2025, was that the Ray-Ban Wayfarer is a halo product, not a daily-driver for most buyers.

Muse Spark Powers the New AI

Every new Meta Glasses ships with Muse Spark, the first model released by Meta Superintelligence Labs. It is a small, fast language model built to reason through science, math, and health questions and to interpret what the glasses’ camera sees.

Meta unveiled Muse Spark on April 8 and updated the rollout on May 12. The model is the foundation of the upgraded Meta AI assistant, and it is designed for multimodal tasks: point the glasses’ camera at something, ask a question, and the assistant responds using the image as context. Meta’s Muse Spark announcement positions the model as the first in a new series, with the next generation already in development.

The new glasses launch with Muse Spark preinstalled. Existing Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta owners in the United States and Canada will get the same model through a software update, and the $799 Ray-Ban Display will receive it this summer. Meta has also said it is exploring a camera-free version of the new glasses, focused on audio for calls, media, and AI interaction, which could open a still-lower price point and new frame styles.

The Privacy Cloud That Won’t Lift

Meta is shipping its most accessible smart glasses yet in the same month that WIRED published an analysis showing the company had quietly embedded face-recognition code into its companion app. The feature, internally called NameTag, lives inside a Meta AI app downloaded more than 50 million times and is the same app required to set up Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.

Per WIRED’s analysis, the code can identify people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when triggered, notify the wearer that a face has been matched against a database stored on the device. A May version of the app rebrands the feature as “Connections” and invites users to “remember the people you met.” Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels told WIRED that the company is “not building a central face database” and that “nothing has shipped to consumers.” The New York Times reported in February that Meta plans to add the feature, internally called Name Tag, to its smart glasses “as soon as this year” and reviewed an internal Reality Labs memo that described launching the feature during a “dynamic political environment” when civil society critics would be focused elsewhere.

Meta’s history of facial recognition is long and expensive. The company paid $650 million to settle an Illinois class action and $1.4 billion to resolve a Texas lawsuit over its collection of biometric data through Facebook’s now-defunct photo-tagging system. In 2019, Meta paid $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission to settle a wider privacy case that included face-recognition concerns. Against that backdrop, even the ship date of the new Meta Glasses is being read by privacy advocates as a signal of where the company is heading next.

Bosworth was asked about tampering and misuse at the Monday event. His answer: “It is a cat and mouse game with people who are bad actors. We try to make sure that we’re doing everything we can generationally to continue to improve, making sure that light is the indicator that bystanders can rely on to understand what’s happening on the glasses.” The LED recording indicator remains Meta’s primary public safeguard.

The Market Meta Is Sitting On

The bet makes sense only because the smart glasses market is moving fast. According to IDC data cited by CNN, smart glasses shipments surged 167% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, reaching approximately 2.25 million units in a single quarter. Meta holds 69.2% of that market, a lead built on the strength of its Ray-Ban partnership with EssilorLuxottica and a marketing machine few hardware companies can match.

During Meta’s April earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the number of people using its glasses daily has tripled year over year. CFO Susan Li noted that while Meta’s Reality Labs segment revenue fell 2% year over year in the first quarter, “continued strong growth in AI glasses sales” helped offset some of the decline from slower Quest headset sales. Meta is on track to spend upwards of $145 billion on capital expenditures in 2026 on everything from AI chips to training new models. Wall Street has been wary: the stock is off 14% year to date and 17% over the past 12 months.

The price pressure on the category is baked in. IDC forecasts that the average selling price of smart glasses will drop from $376 in 2026 to $229 by 2030, a decline of nearly 40% over four years. That trajectory is exactly the one Meta is leaning into with a $299 starting price, three frame choices, and a $399 celebrity edition.

• 167% YoY smart glasses shipment growth, Q1 2026 (IDC)
• ~2.25 million units shipped in Q1 2026 (IDC)
• 69.2% Meta market share, Q1 2026 (IDC)
• Daily Meta glasses users tripled YoY (Zuckerberg, April earnings)
• $376 (2026) to $229 (2030) smart glasses ASP (IDC forecast)

The Rivals Closing In

Google and Samsung are collaborating on a new pair of AI glasses running Android XR, due later this year. Google showed an early look at its audio smart glasses at its annual developers conference in May, betting that Gemini’s reach into email, photos, search, and calendars will give it an edge that Meta cannot manufacture overnight. Snap is iterating on its fifth generation of Spectacles. OpenAI is also working on a hardware product.

Apple, by contrast, has slipped. Its first smart glasses will not reach buyers until late 2027, close to a year later than the company had planned, leaving Meta a clearer runway in the category through 2026. Per Pew Research, 44% of American adults use ChatGPT, 24% use Gemini, and 14% use Meta AI; Meta’s glasses are, in part, a vehicle to push that last number up. Runar Bjorhovde, an Omdia analyst covering mobile devices, told CNN that the open question for every smart glasses maker is whether the category can do something “completely unique” with the camera that justifies the price. Hardware has not been Meta’s problem in this market. Apple’s smart glasses slipping to late 2027 gives Meta another year to find the answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much do the new Meta Glasses cost?

Meta Glasses start at $299 for the Adventurer and Fury styles. The Kylie Jenner collaboration, called Starfire, costs $399.

When can you buy Meta Glasses?

Meta debuted the line at a New York press event on Monday and announced availability on Tuesday, with all three styles sold through Meta’s own store and select retailers.

What is Muse Spark?

Muse Spark is the first large language model released by Meta Superintelligence Labs, announced on April 8, 2026. It is designed for fast multimodal reasoning and is rolling out to the new Meta Glasses, then to existing Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta glasses in the US and Canada via a software update.

Is Meta still working with EssilorLuxottica?

Yes. EssilorLuxottica still manufactures the new Meta Glasses and its logo appears on the inside of the temple and on the packaging. The Ray-Ban and Oakley co-branded lines remain on sale, unchanged.

What privacy protections do Meta Glasses have?

Every pair ships with an LED recording indicator on the front of the frame that Meta says will not function unless the light is visible. Bosworth acknowledged that tampering is a known issue and that Meta is working on further updates to address misuse.